


Dawn City

by Rubynye



Category: No Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Bronze Age, Catal Huyuk, Catalhoyuk, Copper Age, F/F, F/M, Gen, Historical, Minoan, Multi, historical fiction - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-11-30
Updated: 2003-11-30
Packaged: 2017-10-28 15:03:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 12
Words: 55,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/309144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rubynye/pseuds/Rubynye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is my 2003 NaNoWriMo Novel, a <i>bildungsroman</i> about Silthri, a woman who comes to live in the early city that would become Catal Huyuk several thousand years later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Foreword and Disclaimer**
> 
> Before there were civilizations, there were cities. From the very earliest example yet known (Jericho, 11000 BP) to the towns that grew into Uruk, Harappa and Hierankopolis, people in the Neolithic built small cities of a few thousand people, often surrounded by walls, from which they traded in the most advanced products of their day. What might life in one of those cities be like? I decided to try to imagine such a life, specifically life in the Anatolian settlement of Catal Huyuk, which dates to 8000-9000 BP.
> 
> One of the reasons I wanted to write this story is that I like cities, not least because I grew up in one. I think cities can be marvelous places, full of opportunities and freedom, places where people have chances to specialize, to structure their lives around ties of friendship as well as family, and so on. I wanted to write about one woman's experience of moving to a city from the more typical tiny village settlement of the time, and, through writing about her life, to writing about the city.
> 
> All this said, I must add my disclaimer. Although I have studied as much as I could about Catal Huyuk (the site is currently being excavated, so there is a wealth of information), many facets of people's lives, from their philosophies to their rituals to their songs, can never be dug up. My vision of Catal Huyuk, and of my characters' lives there, is not, nor is intended to be, a presentation of the way things were. These are my thoughts and ideas on the way things might have been.
> 
> That said, on to the book.

"Silthri! Silthri, darling! Come up here!"

Whenever Hadinis called her 'darling' Silthri knew it was a command. She dragged the wild-cow hide she was washing in the stream into its basket, folding it as best she could, then rinsed her arms, stood up, and straightened her hide dress.

Silthri was fifteen then, which was a little old to be an unmarried maiden in the village of R'chue, and all the more so when one was as pretty a maiden as Silthri, with her long black hair like a raven's wing, her large clear brown eyes, her heart-shaped face and her slender young curves; it was also a bit old when one was an orphan like Silthri, whose stepmother had brought her to R'chue eight years before and died of a fever two years before. It wasn't from lack of courting that Silthri was still unmarried; she didn't want any of the available young men in R'chue, currently numbered at four, and she was growing more frustrated with their persistence, while they and their mothers were growing more annoyed at her obduracy. That was where Silthri stood, that late spring day by the banks of the stream, as she rolled her eyes when Hadinis called her once more, more sharply.

"I'm coming, Hadinis!" Silthri called, as she hurried up the bank and between the eight clustered round-houses, leaving the hide beside the tanning-shed. She really couldn't afford to annoy Hadinis, she reflected, in whose house she was safe to sleep, not least because Hadinis' sons were safely married, the elder even expecting a child with his wife. If Silthri had to sleep in any of her suitors' mothers' homes she knew she'd end up married, by force or by exhaustion. Silthri didn't know what she did want yet, but she knew it wasn't any of them.

Hadinis was standing with a slightly tall young man who had curly dark brown hair bound back in a thong and who wore the shell-and-tooth necklaces of a trader and an exotic hammered-copper armband. He was not quite young, past twenty despite not having a beard, but sturdy and well-built and handsome, and when he smiled broadly at her Silthri saw he had pale complete teeth, and twinkling hazel eyes beneath heavy brown brows. Shyly, Silthri dropped her gaze, and found herself looking at his broad, bare, tanned chest, and her heart began to pound, her ears to roar. She barely heard Hadinis introduce her and continue, "as I was saying, she is unmarried, and though she is small she is strong, and fifteen already."

The trader wasn't really listening to Hadinis either, Silthri saw. He was looking at her, in an odd but not unfriendly way. Silthri felt her face burn, but still the young man stared at her for a long moment, before wordlessly taking off his pack and pulling out a hide bag as large as his head which clinked with the obsidian it contained. He handed it to Hadinis, who looked at this wealth in surprise; then he held out his hands to Silthri, who stared at them. "Silthri?" he asked. His voice was low and warm, with an unfamiliar accent, and her name sounded good in it, she thought, and was surprised at herself to think it. "Silthri, I am Dexias, from Lillun. Will you come with me?"

She stared at his broad empty hands, unable to look up. So Hadinis had solved the problem of the obstinate unmarried girl! She could almost have said "no" for spite, but she remembered those twinkling hazel eyes. Besides, what was here for her in R'chue besides the grave of her stepmother? Her stepmother's kin would tend it. Silthri laid her own hand wordlessly in Dexias', and he closed his warm strong hands around her own. As if dazed, unable to think yet on the enormity of her decision, Silthri nodded and muttered, "I need to pack." She could feel Dexias smile, even though she was still looking down at their hands.

"Oh, no need, darling! I made up a bundle for you!" When Silthri looked up at her, Hadinis had in her hands the bundle she'd been holding when Silthri had first seen her with Dexias, and which she'd assumed to be trade goods. But then, Silthri reflected with a touch of rue, she was the trade goods. Wordlessly she took the bundle, wrapped in a kidskin that Silthri assumed was her cloak. A fair number of her belongings were likely to be there, but even so, Hadinis was making her pay steeply for her lodgings.

Surprising both women, Dexias sternly asked, "are all her things there?" and Hadinis, usually at no loss for words, actually stammered. "I'm sure they are," said Silthri, putting on a smile for Hadinis, though she knew that Nitilis, Hadinis' daughter, had likely gone through Silthri's things for the jewelry and clothing she wanted before packing them. Silthri was filling up with a great, consuming desire to just be gone from R'chue. She'd made her decision; she wanted to start living it.

Hadinis smiled broadly back. "Let me go gather everyone from the field and the stream banks, so we can all bid you farewell."

"Thank you, Hadinis, but that's not necessary." Silthri heard herself speak with her dead stepmother's voice, and blessed Enitheris once more in her memory. She was trembling, all soft and fluttery inside, but her stepmother's voice sounded strong in her mouth. "Thank you for, for all your kindness to me. Farewell." Silthri turned to go, not realizing she still held Dexias' hand until she felt him turn with her. "Farewell and thank you, Headwoman," he said to Hadinis, and then they were walking away, away from R'chue, towards what Silthri did not know.

  
*

"We could have at least had a meal," said Dexias. Silthri's heart jumped, and she started to apologize, but he laughed, and when she looked up at his face she saw that he was a man who teased. "I could see that you wanted to leave," he told her. "Were they unkind to you?"

Silthri shook her head slightly, searching for the words to say. They were no longer walking hand in hand, but they were still walking, following a path that Dexias knew, and about two hours now from R'chue. Silthri was content for the moment to follow him. She didn't know why she trusted him, but she did. "They were not so unkind, but, I was never one of them. I don't remember my mother; she died when I was very young. Enitheris, my stepmother, was from here, and she married my father when I was little; she was the mother who raised me. When he died when I was seven, when all our family died but the two of us, she came back here --- back to R'chue--- with me, and then when she died I was alone, and the young men and their mothers all thought that meant I wanted to marry one of them. "

"You didn't?"

"No, I just, just could not see spending the rest of my life in any of their beds bearing any of their children. Nothinden was only being pushed by his mother, he's not really ready to marry even if he has enough years; Honinar and I always fight; Nisiden kills with too much delight and beats his brothers and sisters; and Enihado is just stupid." Silthri paused, realizing that she had been going on and on about herself, saying more than she had in years. She looked down, and Dexias paused, then turned and came back to her; when she looked up he put a finger under her chin and kissed her. Confused, she stiffened, and he stopped, still looking at her. "Is that why you bought me?" she asked plainly, before she could stop herself. "Am I, am I your belonging?"

"No." She tried to drop her head, but he raised her chin gently, so she could see into his hazel eyes. "No, Silthri, I don't own you. You own yourself. I traded with that woman for you because you didn't belong in that village. I won't lie and say I don't desire you, but you aren't obligated to me. If we don't become bedmates I know you will find one in Lillun. My City needs more women like you."

Something in his words warmed her inside, and Silthri felt herself smiling, a real smile. "Thank you. Thank you for, for taking me from R'chue. I had nowhere to go if I left. Now you can introduce me to your village."

Dexias laughed again, and Silthri stared at him, confused; he patted her shoulder and started walking again, and she followed him. "What amuses you?"

He grinned at her, showing his strong white teeth. "I don't live in a village, I live in a city. It's a different sort of place. How many people live in R'chue?"

"With the last two babies, thirty-four, I think. Well, thirty-three now."

"My city is much larger than that. More people live there than I can exactly count; we have to estimate."

Silthri tried to think of that many people. "Do two hundred people live there?"

"Oh, no. Far more. Nearly five thousand."

"There are that many people in the _world_? What a huge place it must be! I will always be lost!" Silthri could almost have quailed, but somehow, the idea of such a spectacular collection of people was also exciting. Dexias grinned even more widely and patted her shoulder again. "Oh, I think you will love Lillun", he said. "I think it will suit you like water suits a fish. And I know that the people there will love you."

*

  
That night they reached a cave set into a low bluff, with a spring nearby; Dexias told Silthri that it was a traditional resting place for traders and travelers. She had never been this far from R'chue since she had come to it, but he knew it was still within R'chue's hunting lands, so they caught a few birds and plastered them with clay to roast them in the ashes of their campfire. Dexias gave Silthri a smile and some dry bread from his pack and curled up under a woven gray cloak; Silthri looked at the cloth with a bit of curiosity, as she had not seen weaving since she left her father's village with her stepmother; the people of R'chue were only starting to farm grain, and so wore only leather and furs. After staring at it for a bit, she was able to identify it as wool.

Hunger soon won out over curiosity, and Silthri turned her attention to the bread, only to find curiosity there too. It was browner than she was used to, and less sweet, more nutty. "Dexias?" she called softly over her shoulder.

"Silthri?" he replied sleepily, his accent drawing out the 'i' in a way she found herself liking. "I'm awake. What is it?"

"What is this bread? I don't think I have had it ever."

"It's wheat bread." Dexias sat up. "I saw that your village farmed barley. Did you ever trade for any wheat?"

"No, I think not". Silthri finished the strange bread. "They don't trade with neighbors, except for the other three villages of their tribe, and I didn't get much of the trade-goods after my stepmother died." She wrapped her arms around herself, for the night was cooling off, and looked out of the cave mouth, across the glowing embers, out at the wide plain and the low new moon's thin crescent of light.

"Come lie down," muttered Dexias sleepily. "We'll both be warmer." Silthri looked at him, but he was curled up again; she wrapped herself in her kidskin cloak and curled up against his back. His broad, warm, male back, and his male smell washing over her... she could feel the response between her thighs, and curled herself tighter, willing herself to sleep.

*

As pink dawn light slanted into the cave Silthri woke up slowly and warm, Dexias snuggled up against her back, his arm over her waist. Waking up so comfortable, she sighed with pleasure and stretched a bit, and felt his hardness against her rump.

That woke her fully. Springing up, Silthri looked down at Dexias, who muttered in his sleep and clutched her cloak to himself. All the day before, talking to him about her life and his, she had not thought about that one essential fact that lay between them. Since she had become a maiden, Silthri had only met one other man, if a man he was, whom she wanted to lie with as she wanted to lie with Dexias now, and she had lain with that man. But then, that man may have been a god, or a dream, or a spirit, or something else she could not even fathom; Dexias was a solid real man, who would not vanish in a haze of pleasure. He had brought her from the village where she'd spent two lonely, embattled years, and he was warm and kind and seemingly trustworthy, but she had only known him for one day.

Silthri shook her head as if she could dislodge the whirling confusion; she thought of her stepmother, of asking her for advice, and then thought of what her stepmother would say to see her shaking her head sideways, and started to laugh so that she had to stuff a hand in her mouth to keep from waking Dexias. Why was she so afraid in the face of a gift? The spirit who had smiled upon her had changed her whole life, from one morning to the next, so she could stand in the morning and look down at the face of her future. Silthri sent a silent blessing to her stepmother, who was surely the spirit guiding her, and kept watching Dexias' face, pleasant in sleep. She was still looking at Dexias when he opened his eyes, and smiled to see her there; Silthri blushed and spun away to dig the birds out of the cold embers, feeling Dexias smiling at her back.

*

After another day of walking and talking and singing, a day when they left R'chue's lands to enter the first of several tribes' grounds between them and Lillun, and so Dexias warned Silthri sternly that they could no longer hunt any animals, even fish, until they reached his city's lands, and after another night where they slept back to back, they came at midday through an open wood of oaks and pistachios to a river. Silthri danced for happiness to see it; living on the banks of a stream as she had, she had been accustomed to bathing nearly every day when there was water enough. Dexias smiled to watch her and finished eating his handful of pistachio nuts as she unbraided her hair and ungirdled her dress and threw herself with joy into the cool, swift-moving river.

Silthri swam till her arms ached pleasantly, rinsed her hair, and washed her entire body. From a bit upstream Dexias waved to her, also bathing in the river, and in her exuberance she waved back, smiling from ear to ear before she realized it. By the time she swam back to the shallows, standing hip-deep in water and winding her wet hair atop her head, Dexias was out and dressed in his kilt again, but he had left off his jewelry, and he knelt on the riverbank, watching her the way a hungry hunter watches the doe that is his salvation. Feeling the heat of his gaze through even the cool of the water, Silthri looked up at Dexias and felt her cheeks burn.

"Silthri?" Dexias' accent drew out the last syllable of her name till it was nearly a song. "Silthri, will you lie with me?"

Silthri stared up at him from the river. His hazel eyes looked larger than ever. "Does that, does that mean we will be married?"

"Only if you want to be." Dexias smiled, but his eyes were still wide and large. Silthri felt as if she were falling into those eyes the way she fell into the river. Her throat too tight to speak, she nodded, and walked up the riverbank to him, to stand before him as he stood.

"I don't want to be married," she said sternly, as much to herself as to him, her face down so that she was looking down at herself, at her breasts and belly and feet. Dexias put a finger underneath her chin to turn her face up to his. "Do you want me?" he asked, his voice assuming no answer.

Silthri nodded shyly, and put her arms up around his neck, drowning in his hazel eyes. Dexias brought his arms up around her, his broad hands warm on her back, pressing her to him as he kissed her with everything within him, and she kissed him back, his heat catching in her like a coal in dry grass.

*

Silthri laughed, and listened to her voice rippling with unaccustomed happiness. Dexias ran his fingers up her back under her loosened wet hair; his chest beneath her cheek was damp and warm, his heart beating slowly again despite his own laughter. She remembered the way it had pounded in her ear as she'd clutched him, and felt herself blush again.

Dexias' hand slid slowly up to caress her neck. "Silthri?" he asked, his voice changed again. She nodded against his chest, suddenly shy, and he kissed the top of her head, where her hair had been piled before it fell free across them. "May I ask something?" She nodded again, and his stroking hand moved to her hot cheek, stroking away the blush, as he went on, "why do you not want to get married?"

Silthri shrugged. "That's not an answer", replied Dexias gently, and she could almost have been angry, except that she knew he was right, and forced herself to words. "I don't want to lose my, my freedom yet. I have spent the last two years fighting not to."

"Lillun will be a very different place than R'chue was." Dexias's warm hand slid down her arm. "Marriages are different there, too. People of several tribes live in Lillun, so our customs draw on several sources and are rather, um, flexible." As she opened her mouth to protest he added, "Not that I don't see what you mean. What if we make a child? What would you want to do then?"

"I suppose," said Silthri slowly, "I would have to marry you then."

Dexias laughed at that, and she tossed up her head in surprise, and he smiled at her. "This is what I mean about Lillun being different. You could marry me, or you could give the child to me and my sister, if you didn't want to marry me."

"Your sister." The knot of fear returned to Silthri's stomach, and she laid her head down again, clutching Dexias for comfort. The only thing he had told her in their journey together so far that had made her want to turn back was that he had a sister of nineteen years, a woman named Orani who kept their mother's house with him. Silthri knew enough of life to know that each house has one woman to run it, and that a woman rarely likes a challenge to her authority or bears well anything she might see to be a challenge. What would Orani say, to see that her brother had brought back, not grains or dried venison, not nuts or herbs or a captured lamb, but a maiden girl?

"My sister will like you," said Dexias firmly, wrapping his arms warmly around Silthri. "I have known her all her life; I can tell you that she will be as fond of you as I am." Silthri said nothing, trying to soak in the comfort in his voice, to disentangle and dispel the knot of fear in her belly. Then she truly heard his words, and lifted her head to look into those hazel eyes. "You are fond of me?"

"From the moment I saw you. You're the best trade I ever made." Dexias smiled at her so mischievously that she laughed helplessly. "You're beautiful, Silthri, and you have a mind behind these gazelle's eyes. You have clever small fingers and strong legs and ears to hear and a voice to sing. You were wasted in that village. How could I not be fond of you?" Silthri smiled at him with delight, warmed by his words, and drew herself up to kiss him; he kissed her in return, holding her tightly, ready again, and she joined him.

*

Three days after that, they were walking through oaks, hazels, and chestnuts, still following the same wide river. Silthri's hair hung down her back in a damp braid, held with a bone finial that Dexias had pulled from his pack, and she wore one of Dexias' necklaces and one of red clay and lead beads that the ancient, kindly headman of the village of Tenulli had given her "because you are so beautiful", which had made her blush fiercely and hide her face, muttering thanks. Dexias had sold some of his remaining obsidian there, for an evening and a morning meal, some lead ore, shells, dark-red pigment, dried fish, and a chunk of horn. Pleased by their visit to Tenulli, Silthri and Dexias now wandered hand in hand up through the open woodland, walking at a relaxed pace and absorbing the large breakfast their hosts had fed them.

"Maybe I should ask you to come with me on my next trading trip," said Dexias. "It helps greatly having someone with me to carry things. Your pack isn't too heavy?"

"That's the fourth time you asked me that," said Silthri with a giggle. "I'm a strong girl, I'll be fine. It's harder carrying this bellyful of food!" Dexias smiled at that; Silthri liked his smile all the more each time she saw it. "Do you always travel alone?"

"No; I go on the regular large caravans much of the time, or with several others at least. However, going with others means compromising on where to trade, and for what; trips by myself mean I can decide where to go, strike out off the trade routes if I like. There are some tiny settlements out there, little more than a family living by themselves, which really enjoy the rare visitor bearing obsidian and fresh seed."

"Fresh seed? What sort--- _oh_." Dexias grinned and waggled his eyebrows, as Silthri giggled and felt her face burn with a blush; he reached over with his other hand to touch her cheek. "You blush wonderfully", he said, and her face burned all the hotter. "Like light coming through a glowing coal." He leaned towards her to replace his fingers with his lips, and Silthri turned her face towards him, so that he kissed his way across her cheek to her mouth.

After a long kiss, as he started to turn towards her, Silthri pulled away, as Dexias' words kept working in her head. "How many children do you have, Dexias?"

He smiled, with a touch of rue. "I don't know. I've been trading, and traveling, since I was twelve, and I came to manhood fairly early. I have none in Lillun, though. My wives, the first one died, and so did the baby." The smile was fading. "The second has found a man she likes better, a man who is home every night. So there we are." He looked sad now, and distant.

Silthri squeezed his hand. "I'm sorry. I just wanted to know, I, I want to know about you."

"And I about you." Dexias' smile returned, like sunshine. "And of course you do. You left all your life to come with me."

"There was not much to that life, though." Silthri reached out with her free hand to snag a fat caterpillar; she bit the head off to taste it, found it not a bitter kind, and bit half off, popping the other half into Dexias' mouth. Food was for eating, after all. "I think, I think I am looking forward to Lillun, to this huge City you've been telling me about."

Dexias grinned again at that. "Now I have a question for you, my fair one. You refused to marry in R'chue, but you weren't a virgin."

Silthri looked at him, confused. "Did you, do you, mind?"

"No, of course not." Dexias squeezed her hand reassuringly. "You're a woman. But, I do want to know about you, know your stories."

"You'll laugh at me." Silthri's face burned again, hotter than ever. Dexias shook his head, but she couldn't look at him while telling this story, so she looked down at her feet, placing one before the other in the soft spring grass as she began.

"I was in the woods one day, in the spring, last year. It happened to be the day after the Equinox, and it was warmer than usual, it was beautiful. I felt the life rising in me. I left the other girls, and went deeper into the woods, and when I was alone in a clearing, I danced. Perhaps I was possessed the Maiden of Spring. I don't know, but it was magic, and he was magic." She paused, and Dexias made an encouraging noise, so she drew breath and continued. "He was very tall, and brown like acorns, with green, green eyes, hairy and warm and musky-smelling, shoulders nearly as broad as my arm span, naked as from his mother. He saw me, and he danced with me till the trees spun around me, and he undid my girdle and took my dress off me, and we lay together. It hurt, at first, but then it felt better, and better, and then he peaked."

"Selfish weevil," said Dexias cheerfully. "He missed a good deal by not bringing you to yours first. You feel wonderful when you do." Silthri giggled and looked back down at her feet, but felt much more at ease nevertheless. "That was my first, and, considering, it could have been so much more painful. When Danilis married she wept the next day about how much it had hurt. Considering she married that brute Nethono I was not surprised..." Silthri realized she was babbling, and fell silent.

Dexias kissed her on her ear. "I thought, when I first met you, that you were a virgin. but then when you came to me and put your arms around me, I could feel it that you weren't."

"How could you tell?"

"There's just a way a woman reacts. A man can feel it."

"You sound as if you've had many women," Silthri said, more sharply than she meant to, and instantly wished the words back; seeing her stricken face Dexias smiled and stroked her cheek. "I have had some. I like women, I enjoy women. Right now, I am beside a woman I enjoy very much." Silthri smiled and quickly kissed him on his jaw, and they walked onward between the trees.

*

  
"I don't know if we can do this anymore," said Dexias sleepily. Alarmed, Silthri rolled over in the tall grass to look at him; she was getting used to his body and the way he lay with her, and enjoyed each time more than the last. When she found him grinning she slapped his shoulder gently. "You are such a beast! Always teasing me."

"No, I'm serious," he persisted, manifestly not. "Sister Sun is up already, but here we are, wrapped in each other. We sleep longer, because we sleep together. And when you bathe I cannot resist you. At this rate we will never reach home!"

Silthri laughed and play-slapped him again. "Oh, you make me laugh." Hearing herself say that sobered her. "I think I have laughed more these eight days than I have since I, since my father died."

"I'm fortunate, then, to set free so much laughter," said Dexias, more solemnly, sitting up to take Silthri's hands in his. "You should laugh, Silthri. You should be happy. It hurts to think of you not laughing."

Silthri's eyes hurt her at that, and her heart hurt too, a sweet pain. Having no words, she smiled and squeezed Dexias' hands, and turned away to get up and get her comb.

As he dressed and packed up their camp, Dexias watched Silthri comb her hair with difficulty; her comb, carved of horn, had been her stepmother's before her, and it was snaggletoothed and worn, its carving breaking off. "When we arrive at Lillun I'm going to trade for another comb for you," he said.

"Oh, don't, this comb is fine!" Silthri cried, envisioning him trading away far too much just on her behalf. Combs were very expensive. Dexias smiled and shook his head. "You need another one," he persisted, "and combs are not so costly in Lillun. We have lots of horn there. I hardly know why I'm bringing more home with me."

"Plenty of horn?" Silthri stared at him amazed. "How? How do you catch all those sheep and aurochs?"

"We don't need to catch all of them---oh, you will see soon. While I'm at it I should have an obsidian necklace made for you, and shell anklets. Obsidian to put by that shining black hair, shells to glow round your slender ankles."

"I don't need any of that! What an extravagance, using obsidian for beads!"

"Mirrors, too." Dexias grinned widely as Silthri stared at him, hair-combing forgotten in her amazement. "Lillun owns the Double Mountain and the Black-shine Mountain, you know. The mountains where all the obsidian comes from."

"What a rich city it must be," whispered Silthri, awed by the image of people who had enough obsidian to wear it and make mirrors of it, whatever mirrors were. "I'll look so poor to the people there."

"You will look like yourself, with your beauty and your strength and your clever fingers. That's wealth enough and more, trust me." Dexias kissed her reassuringly and put her pack beside her. "And if we walk swiftly today, we can make it there before sunset. See that hill, there?" As Silthri stood, braiding her hair, he pointed out a low, distant mound to the southwest. "That is where we are bound. That's my home City, Lillun."

Silthri threaded the end of her braid through her bone finial and shouldered her pack. That night she would sleep in her new home, be submerged in the lake of people. Already she missed the intimate days alone with Dexias; already she could hardly wait to arrive.


	2. Chapter 2

Silthri stared, eyes full of wonder. Her feet planted in the dust of the path, her hide traveling-dress shaggy around her calves, the bone finial on her soft, thick black braid dangled down to her thighs as she tilted her head further back, looking up and up at row on row of houses. She had thought she had imagined what Lillun might look like, but this seemingly endless horde of houses, rising up and up over the crest of the hill, dwarfed anything she could have envisioned. The whitewashed houses, their shared outer wall brightly painted with geometric designs, were clustered together, not a path between them. Over them all, using the roofs as roads, over the landscape around the city, coming and going across the plain, swarmed people, more people than Silthri had ever seen, people wearing clothes of hide or leopard skin or even cloth, people with patterns painted on their bodies in red and black and white, people wearing jewelry that included designs and materials she'd never seen before, people leading animals by ropes and holding unfamiliar tools to tend grain...

"This is Lillun, Dawn City," said Dexias beside her. "Big, isn't it?"

Silthri nodded, unable to speak. "Big" did not cover it. "Big" was Tenulli, which looked to have had perhaps an hundred people living in it. Lillun was like nothing she had ever seen before. What a powerful deity it must have. Would she get lost in this huge place? Would it swallow her alive, demand her as sacrifice?

Dexias took her hand to lead her towards the edge of the hill, to a point between two rubbish dumps where broad steps were cut into the hillside and floored with ground-stone slabs. "We've come from the north, so we didn't walk through the Trading Place to the south or the Meeting Place to the west. I can show them to you, if you like."

"Maybe, maybe not now, maybe tomorrow, tomorrow..." Silthri was still staring around her, overwhelmed by the hugeness of the settlement, the brightness of the colors, the number and diversity of the people. She wanted to turn and run, she wanted to go forward into its heart. She let Dexias lead her onto a flat roof, then across to another, and so on until they reached a house with a small second storey which was hung with a flat wooden rack full of pegs and impressed with three handprints in black, a red spiral painted on the palm of each one. Dexias lifted the roof flap and stuck his head into it. "Hullo, Orani?"

"Back already?" called an alto voice from within. "Well, get down here and let's see what you've got this month."

Dexias leaned back up. "Climb down", he told Silthri. "There's a ladder underneath the trap door." Silthri did so, though she was shaking so that she could hardly cling to the wooden rails; Dexias watched her, and climbed down after her.

Her feet touched down on clean rush matting. Inside the house was dark and cool and smelled of good food cooking. Silthri blinked a few times, then found she could see better, see the paintings on the walls and the partition-wall with the oven glowing through the arched door-hole in it. She turned round, looking around the large, rectangular, mat-floored living room, and found herself face to face with a woman who had to be Dexias' sister, with her slightly taller-than-average height, the brown curls spilling over her shoulders and bare full breasts, the dark-colored woven fringed skirt, the hands on her hips, and the rakish tilt of her head.

Silthri gasped, freezing in place, and then knelt and bowed deeply. "Greetings, lady," she stammered, Orani regarded her for a long moment, then laughed, much the way her brother did, a rolling peal of merriment, and reached to gently place her hands on Silthri's upper arms and lift her to her feet. "Hello, child," said Orani warmly. "And who are you?"

"Her name is Silthri, and she'll be living with us for at least awhile." Dexias walked up to kiss his sister on her cheek and put his arm around Silthri. "She'll tell you her story, if you let her get her bearings."

"Let her get her bearings?! What of mine? Of all the capers you have pulled in your twenty-five years---"

"What would you know about my twenty five years? You've only been around for nineteen of them." Dexias grinned at his sister, who grinned back, and Silthri realized that they must always tease each other like this. She also realized that she'd been holding her breath, and she let it out slowly.

"Earth and Moon, girl, you are shaking," said Orani, gently pulling Silthri over to one of the two platforms by the wall. "Has he been feeding you?"

"Dexias has, has been very, very good to me," stammered Silthri, even as Dexias protested, "of course I have!" Orani grinned, her teeth broad and white like her brother's, and patted Silthri's shoulder. "Well, have some proper food now, made in a City house, not roasted over some primitive campfire." Orani bounced ---there was really no other word for it--- across the room to return with a fist-sized pottery bowl filled with a steaming stew. Silthri took the bowl gratefully, bowing her head as she managed to stammer, "thank you"; Dexias demanded a bowlful, was told by Orani to fetch it himself, and headed across the house to do so. The stew tasted of mutton and herbs, and of well-rinsed acorn flour. Silthri drank, feeling the trembling ease and stop, feeling the stew and Orani's cheerful hospitality fill her up with warmth and sanctuary.

 

 

*

 

Silthri lay awake, watching the embers of the hearth slowly fade. Orani lay between her and the wall, snoring gently and musically; Orani and Dexias had cheerfully mock-argued as to who would sleep with Silthri that night, and he now lay on the far side of the room, snoring a baritone counterpoint to Orani's alto. At least he had kissed Silthri goodnight.

The shadows of the house swirled with unfamiliarity, and Silthri stared at them, trying to will them and her unease into fading. This house was larger than the houses she'd lived in before; those in R'chue and in Tenulli were round, while those in the village of her birth were square, but separated by walkways and work-spaces and not always aligned in direction, and in all those villages the communal ovens were separate buildings. Inside those small village houses held mostly belongings, a hearth, and a tamped floor; this house was much larger and more complex, with its open central space and its painted walls and its sleeping platforms and its own oven and its partition walls and niches. Not to mention its outer walls, hard by the other houses'; in one of the neighboring houses, a couple had lain together noisily and enthusiastically, and through the touching walls Silthri could hear everything. Dexias and Orani had not even paid attention till they saw Silthri's blushing reaction, and then they joked about it, Orani teasing Dexias with impudent questions about whether Silthri was as loud as the woman they heard, which Dexias ostentatiously refused to answer while Silthri blushed till her face burned like a coal. She had wondered if Dexias would be inspired by the noise to want to lie with her, and was both disappointed and relieved that he seemed not to be.

Now she lay next to Orani, with furs beneath her and a soft, light woven sheet over her, of some material she didn't know. Orani lay beside her like a sister, and seemed to have taken to Silthri considerably. Chide herself as she might for ingratitude, Silthri felt almost as nervous as ever at Orani's warmth. Hostility she at least would have understood, but Orani's easy kindness was rather baffling. Was the woman merely pleased at being given a present? Had Dexias actually brought Silthri home for his sister's sake, to work for her? What would Silthri think of it, if he had?

"Why did I come here?" she whispered to the darkness, and it whispered back, "Because you had nowhere else to go." For some reason, that inevitability made Silthri feel better; whatever happened in her life, she simply had to go on making the best of it.

Silthri turned over to lay her cheek on Orani's warm shoulder and closed her eyes. The darkness still swirled beyond her face, but Orani was nearer, and kind, and warm, and Silthri slowly managed to relax into a quiet, dreamless sleep.

 

 

*

 

In the morning they ate frumenty which Orani had put down by the hearth the day before, with that same nutty wheat-flavor, but also a touch of sweetness and a golden color to the cloudy aspic around the grains. "Did you add honey to this?" Silthri asked, amazed at the wealth of people who could eat honey in their morning porridges.

"Only a little. Honey is a bit rare right now." Orani smiled. "I like it better with a date thrown in, anyway."

"What's a date?" Silthri heard herself sound like a child, and felt herself blush, but she would not learn if she didn't ask.

"A date is a trade-fruit," replied Dexias. "They are half a finger long, oval and brown, and taste like solid honey. Some people think they are made from honey, but when I traded south when I was a boy I saw date-trees, with their tall bare trunks and their bunch of huge feathery leaves on top. Maybe I'll trade for some dates today."

"You go off and trade," said Orani jauntily, wrapping herself in a rectangle of creamy wool with red designs stamped on it and fastening it with a curl of copper wire, "and I'll go show Silthri the City." Silthri made to put on one of her two clean hide dresses, but Orani cried, "Oh, you can't wear that!"

"People don't wear hide here?" Silthri put down the dress nevertheless. "I thought I saw---"

"Of course they do," said Dexias, looking at his sister quizzically, but Orani put her hands on her hips and shook her head. "When she is carrying water and gathering acorns, certainly. Today I want her to meet the City, dressed in something that's as nice to look at as she is." Orani rummaged in a chest for a length of that fine mysterious cloth, paler than the wool dress even in the dim indoor light. "That's a festival dress", said Dexias, and Orani made a face at him as she shook the cloth out. "What else is her first day here than a festival day?"

Silthri watched the cloth billow out, revealing its thinness, its edges bound and worked with bright red and blue threads that had to have been woven in individually somehow, in spirals and curls. "I can't wear this!" Silthri cried, staring at the cloth in Orani's hands with wide eyes. "What a dress! It looks like a goddess' dress!"

Orani laughed cheerfully at that. "It's just a swatch of pretty linen with needle worked borders," she replied, tossing one end of the cloth to Dexias; they wound the cloth twice around Silthri, tucked it in in the front, and wrapped her waist with a sash of red wool that was hung with chiming little tubes of copper and sewn with shells and beads. "Yes, that's more like it," said Orani, stepping back to look at Silthri; when Silthri looked up at Dexias his eyes were as wide as that day at the riverbank. "I didn't think she could look even better than she does naked, um, not that you aren't beautiful naked, um." Dexias trailed off, his mouth open and yet empty of words.

Orani drew off two bracelets, fine red stone beads strung on dyed blue thongs, wound a knot in each to make it smaller, and slid them onto Silthri's hands. "There we go. You should see yourself."

"I will be hearing of the beautiful new woman before the day is out, I expect," said Dexias with a smile, having finally mastered his expression. He kissed Silthri warmly, and stroked her cheek, then shouldered his pack and was gone.

 

*

 

It was nearly midday before Silthri stood with Orani at the highest point of the City. Not because it took so long to walk there ---the City was populous, but closely spaced--- but because a dizzying number of people, from venerable men and women to dancing children wearing only breechclouts and amulets, had stopped the women to greet Orani, who seemed to know them all, and to meet Silthri and admire her, not least the young men. Her head spinning with all their greetings and her body tingling with all the friendly ---and flirtatious--- embraces, Silthri thought she would never manage to know all their names and faces, let alone what they all did, and knowing what someone did was important in the City, Orani had told her. One had to know who had what and who needed what to best know how to trade what one had and one could do, in order to make sure one had what one needed and as much of what one wanted as possible. Silthri, who had never traded for herself--- her stepmother fed and clothed her before she died, and afterwards, the mothers in R'chue thought it their responsibility to keep her fed and dressed, and hers to do whatever work they gave her ---was quite amazed by the entire complicated idea.

Now the two women stood, atop a wide roof, looking out across the City, across at the River glittering to the west and the more distant Double Mountain beyond it, south at the Black-shine Mountain, north to low ridges of hills on the horizon. Silthri looked out at the wide plain with its small groves of trees and seasonal ponds, the distant hills, the territory of Lillun.

"Over in the direction of the Black-shine Mountain," said Orani, pointing, "is the Trading Place. Want to go there and see if any trading parties have arrived today? Any young men weary and hungry from their travels?" Orani waggled her eyebrows suggestively, and Silthri giggled, her head feeling about to float off. "Are you looking for a young man, Orani?" Silthri asked.

"Oh, always." Orani swung her hips as she walked, and a young man on another roof, his hair tied up over his head and wearing a deer skin, turned from his task to howl wolfishly at her; she blew him a kiss. "I like young men."

"Then why aren't you married?" Silthri regretted the words the moment they were out of her mouth. "O, Orani, I---"

"It is a question," said Orani in even tones, facing out across the city, away from Silthri. "And its answer is that I was married when I was young. He died. Dexias' wife Eligo left him, and a good thing too, I never liked the slinky little rat anyway. So he came back, and we keep our mother's house together. "

Silthri nodded, wondering if she should reach out to the older girl. Just as she was lifting her hand, Orani turned, and smiled, and took Silthri's hand and squeezed it. "And now here you are. Dexias hasn't been this happy since before he married Eligo. "

"I haven't married him. I mean, I mean, thank you---"

"I know what you mean, girl. As I said, I like young men." Orani winked. "But I think that we're going to live together well for as long as you choose to stay."

 

 

*

 

The next morning Silthri swayed up the hillside following Orani; each woman bore a jar of river water on her head. Orani carried a pitched basket full of water for washing, while Silthri carried the precious drinking water in an equally precious ground-stone jar with a floating wooden lid. It was heavy, but Silthri held her head high, and gloried in the eyes and whoops of the young men, feeling their gazes slide like hands over the skin left bare by her dress. Dexias had come home singing the previous night, with his pack full to bursting with goods and with a joint of aurochs in his hand, to tell Silthri that people were already asking him who the pretty new girl was and to call her his good luck. Orani had kissed them both, put the meat to slowly roast in the oven, and gone up to sit on the roof and sing, and the sultry alto music of her voice had gone to Silthri's head as Dexias had put his arms around her. The whole world had fallen away to Silthri and Dexias, and Orani singing on the roof, and they joyfully wore each other out; the last thing Silthri remembered was Orani's laughter to see them collapsed together, sliding towards sleep. Now, this bright morning, Silthri was a little tired, a little sore, incredibly happy and aware of the beauty of every bit of her skin.

As she walked Silthri tried to make herself memorize the way from the River to their house. Although the houses were all rectangular, each one was slightly different; most of the houses with second stories had unique designs painted on them, from symbols such as bull's heads, dancing spirits, and the spiral-palmed hands Silthri already knew, to images and even portraits of important residents. Silthri tried to note the houses she passed, but her heart was in a singing mood, and if she hadn't had the water-jar on her head she would have danced for joy in the sunshine.

When they got home Silthri put the jar down on the roof and did exactly that; Orani laughed and cheered and clapped as Silthri raised her arms to Sister Sun and whirled around on the rooftop, feeling the clay of it connecting her to Mother Earth beneath all their feet, feeling the sunlight soak into her skin and run through her veins, feeling herself lifted out of her body up into the air between earth and sky ---

"Watch OUT!" shouted Orani, and Silthri stopped short, slammed back down to earth. She looked down to see the skylight where her next footfall would have been. If Orani hadn't stopped her she'd have taken a nasty fall.

Sobered, Silthri picked up the water jar and climbed down the ladder with it. Orani brought down her basket of water, then walked over to pat the younger woman's shoulder. "It was a lovely dance."

"I shouldn't have." Silthri muttered, hanging her head. "It was foolish of me."

"It was very beautiful," said Dexias, sticking his head down through the trap door. "But then, so are you. I was watching you as I came back. I nearly fell into a skylight myself."

Silthri half-smiled at that, and at Orani's hug. "Cheer up, child. Go walk in the sun some more." Silthri tried to protest that there were acorns to be ground and sweeping to be done, but Orani laughed and pushed her bodily up the ladder; Dexias grasped her wrist and half helped, half pulled her up to the roof, and kissed her soundly and warmingly once she arrived. He dropped his pack through to Orani and, wrapping his arm around Silthri's waist, led her away. "So, what's so awful?" he asked. "You almost fell, is all. Anyone could fall."

"It's just that I, I, I..." Silthri took a deep breath, forcing the words to her lips. "First you, and now you and Orani, take such good care of me, but, I don't want to need taking care of. I should be a woman, not a child."

"Ah." Dexias, a thoughtful look in his eyes, kissed Silthri on her forehead, and they kept walking across the City.

 

*

 

Silthri fumed. It was midday, hot enough that her hairline was damp, and she stood at the edge of the City, trying to remember her way home. In the midst of their walk, Dexias had told her, as calmly as could be, that he would meet her at home and she should explore the City. She stared after his back as he walked away, and by the time she had worked up enough anger to say something sharp and pointed he had already vanished over the edge of the hill. So, his idea of cheering her up was to prove she could swim by throwing her in the river? Silthri was going to chip and polish her words to some fine cutting points by the time she found Dexias again, she thought. Still, she could not remember the way she had come to save her life, since she had spent the walk being pleased with Dexias' company and thinking he would walk her home, so the only sensible plan she could form was to walk to the River and track her way home from there.

So, she had trudged as fast as she could to the edge of the City, keeping her head down and hoping people wouldn't notice her as they bustled around her. She was still amazed by how many people lived in Lillun, all bustling in every direction. Men sat on roofs carving wood and grinding stone and flaking obsidian, crafting items out of softened horn and making beads with drills, teaching their children and talking to their friends. Women wove cloth on wooden frames and coiled baskets, shaped pottery and arranged it to dry in the sun, scraped hides, laid out fruits and strips of meat to dry, and watched little children running around, also in company; often families worked together or just laughed together and ate and played knucklebones in the sunshine.

Feeling a bit lonely, Silthri kept to the edges of roofs, smiled quickly and stepped more quickly when she was hailed, and hurried as fast as she could without actually running, even past people doing work she'd have liked to have seen more of. Aside of nearly falling into a midden before she caught her balance, and lingering too long to listen to the singing of young men and women working at putting up a house, she judged herself to have made fairly good progress, all things considered. Still, emotions can be wearying, and Silthri had had an emotional morning, and by midday just wanted to get herself home to rest; now she struggled to remember where the watering-ford was relative to where she stood, and wiped her brow with the back of her hand, and thought angrily of Dexias.

"How are you, Miss?" asked a girl's voice by her side. Silthri turned to see someone she at first took for a diminutive, fecund woman, but then realized that this delightfully plump girl. who looked like a statuette of the Mother with her voluminous waves of brown-black hair and her almost-pendulous breasts, couldn't possibly be her elder. The girl, wearing a child's breechclout and a woman's necklaces and carrying a large pitched water-basket, smiled and bowed slightly in greeting. "I'm Zeora. You're even prettier than they said you were."

Silthri blushed and smiled all at once, and returned the little bow. "I'm Silthri."

"Your accent isn't that strange, either." Zeora grinned impishly. "I've heard about you."

"Apparently." Silthri could have been cross, but it was too much work, and Zeora's smile was too friendly. "Do I look as lost as I am?"

"No, not unless someone is trying to follow you." Zeora giggled, and Silthri couldn't help but giggle as well. "Are you hungry? My family lives not far from here, because we keep livestock at the edge of the City, see?" She pointed to a pen of sticks, currently empty. Silthri regarded it curiously. "You keep animals there?" Silthri asked.

"Seven fine ewes and nine lambs," said Zeora proudly. "My brothers are out herding them. I should be fetching water, but I'd rather talk to you."

Something new every moment, Silthri thought. She vaguely remembered that people kept a few animals in the village she was born in, but in R'chue people only hunted them. To not have to chase something up hill and down dale to catch it and eat it sounded almost decadent. "I'll come with you to get the water," Silthri told Zeora. "And, yes, I am a little hungry."

 

 

 

*

 

Silthri sat in the center of the happy chaos Zeora called her family. Zeora's father had had two wives, both of whom still lived together quite happily in his house, patting the sleeping platform their dead husband lay beneath and including him in their mealtime conversation. Around them swirled their children, more than Silthri could easily count, ranging from young men older than Silthri to a toddling baby, the child born after his father had died, who ran right up to Silthri and grabbed hold of her as if he owned her.

"How do you like your days here?" asked Mother Amthri, patting Silthri's knee. This warm, full-breasted woman, nearly as wide as she was tall and with her abundant black hair piled atop her head, had drawn Silthri to sit beside her near the hearth as she grilled strips of venison, laying the finished ones in a bowl. Now, Silthri answered her questions slowly and carefully, conscious of her accent. "I like this City. I'm still learning it, though. It's quite large."

Mother Amthri smiled widely at that. "Yes it is, isn't it? Lillun is a splendid place. Nothing like it in all the world!"

"Oh hush, Amthri, of course there are other cities." Mother Irano, a slender woman with grey braids and a large vibrant voice, came back from the oven with a large wooden tray covered with warm flatbreads, barley from the scent of them, and edged with roasted nuts. As she placed it on the main platform she added, "Olas, didn't you visit one once?"

"Olas said he fell off the side of the world once, too," said Amthri cheerfully. "And was kissed by the Morning Star. Our husband tells great stories."

"All traders do." The mothers shared a fond, reminiscent look. "Still, enough of them tell of distant cities, and we can't be the only---Amras! Stop that!"

Amras, a tall slender youth of seventeen with a hawk nose, unwound his arm from his younger brother's neck. "Mother, he was--"

"I don't care," said Irano sternly. "You're a man, you know better. If I see you beating your brothers again you'll go back to the sheep without any lunch." Amras opened his mouth to reply, but his eye fell on Silthri; he smiled at her and bowed submissively to his mother. Irano took a deep breath and called, "Ready!" and, seemingly instantly, the whole family was there, passing bread and fruits and venison strips amongst themselves, older children helping younger ones. Amthri rose from the hearth, leaning just a little on Silthri's arm, and made her slow, majestic way across the room to sit on the platform beside the food, and Silthri sat by her feet. Amras quickly settled to one side of Silthri, Zeora the other.

"So, beautiful stranger," said Amras warmly, passing Silthri a flatbread with some venison on it and leaning in close to her, "what brings you to our City?"

"Dexias did, you dolt," said Zeora before Silthri could more than open her mouth, so Silthri took the opportunity to start eating. Amras made a face at his sister, which he quickly smoothed over into a pleasant look for Silthri. "Fortunate Dexias," said Amras. "He's had no luck with his City-born wives, so he found a new one from the country." Silthri found that statement a bit much, but Zeora's family was feeding her and treating her well, so she merely took another bite of bread and didn't reply.

"Here, drink this," said Amras, handing Silthri a wooden cup full of a warm white liquid. Silthri took a sip, and her mouth was filled with a delicious creaminess, distantly familiar... "It's milk!" piped Zeora. "Amras and Olas-the-Lesser brought it back from our ewes. Isn't it good?"

Silthri nodded. "Thank you," she told Amras, whose eyes twinkled, and she drained the cup. He was about to say something else, leaning in till his arm brushed hers, when his brother, perhaps a year younger and even more hawk-nosed, lunged over to shake his shoulder. "My turn!" cried the boy. "Let me sit with our pretty guest!"

"Shove off!" protested Amras, but Amthri silenced him with "Let Olas-the-Lesser sit with Silthri." With a last smile for Silthri, and a disagreeable glare at his brother, Amras traded places. "I brought you an egg!" said Olas triumphantly to Silthri, offering her a large warm roasted egg.

"Yes, you brought her two," said Zeora snidely, so that Olas turned red and Silthri couldn't help but giggle. "Let her eat in peace already. I didn't bring her here so my brothers could fling yourselves on her." To Silthri she added, "Here, dip your venison in this," offering her a pottery cup, also full of white stuff. "In milk?" asked Silthri, but then she saw the close-set bumpiness of the material, and that it didn't slosh. "Close," said Zeora with a grin, as Silthri tried it. Indeed, it was creamy like the milk, but tangy over that, and a little nutty; Silthri also dipped a piece of bread and saw how the stuff clung thickly to it. "It's yogurt!" cried Zeora in delight. "Aged milk. Even better, isn't it?"

Silthri nodded, her mouth full and her insides warm. Eating his egg, Olas sidled up next to her, less smoothly than his brother had; Silthri smiled, then, emboldened by her lunch, gently pushed him to a more appropriate distance. Olas looked surprised; beyond him, Amras laughed. To take the sting from her action Silthri told Olas "thank you for thinking of me", which earned her a wide grin and a cascade of babble about herding sheep.

Soon enough, the meal was over. Silthri dusted crumbs off her skirt and thanked the mothers, offering to clear up; Amras and Olas offered to take her to see the sheep, but Zeora cried, "no, she must meet the priestesses!" and, grasping Silthri's hand (and running away from having to clean up herself) she pulled Silthri up the ladder and led her across the rooftops.

 

 

 

*

 

What is a priestess? Silthri had wondered to herself, as Zeora led her away. Now she knew. She sat on a sleeping platform, in the most elaborately decorated building she had yet seen in Lillun; to wall-paintings like those she had already seen it added modeled animal-heads, two set with aurochs' horns that amazed Silthri. That people would set such amazing wealth into a wall for decoration! Before her walked an even more amazing woman, of average height and middle years but with power flowing out through her, wearing a dress of leopard skin and enough jewelry for any three women Silthri had seen so far, even to strings of beads wound round her high brow to hold her otherwise free-flowing dark hair. Silthri sat beside Zeora, who was silent in this power-filled place, watching the priestess move around the wide decorated room, performing mysterious little tasks.

Then she turned back to the two girls and smiled. "Welcome, Silthri," she said at last, in a ringing, room-filling voice even fuller than Mother Irano's. "I was waiting for your visit."

"Zeora, Zeora brought me," said Silthri, crediting her friend. "She said I had to meet you." The priestess smiled more widely and said, "Thank you then, Zeora; you were right; all women must come here who come to live in Lillun from elsewhere."

For a moment Silthri was surprised to hear that she was not the first immigrant, even though it made sense on further thought. "What, what is 'here', Lady?"

The priestess laughed warmly. "I should have told you, my girl. I am not the Lady. I am Her helper; my name is Tirano, and I will give you all the answers I can." The priestess sat beside Silthri. "This is a House of the Earth Mother, and I and my sisters keep it."

"Is she the Goddess of Lillun, then?" asked Silthri. "I knew, from a day's journey away, that this place has a powerful god in it."

Tirano smiled. "She is one of our deities. Lillun has several deities, because people of several tribes built this City; that is why we flourish. We are a city of gods as well as people. For instance, do you know why you came here?"

That question definitely startled Silthri. "Be, because Dexias brought me here, because the headwoman of R'chue ---the village where I lived ---sold me to him?"

"Yes, but she did for a reason. He went to that village alone for a reason. Two days' walk from R'chue is there a village called Andoma?"

"There, there was." The village of Silthri's birth, the village that she had left with her stepmother after a devastating sickness killed nearly half its people.

Tirano nodded. "The people of Andoma left Lillun, in the time of my grandmother's grandmother. They had a village there, till a sickness scourged it, and most of the survivors came back to Lillun when I was a maiden. Some did not, and you are one of those. That is why you have a name from Lillun, and that is why Dexias was sent to bring you back to the City."

"How do you know all this?" Silthri heard herself whisper, and Tirano smiled. "This is what I do, I remember, I know things. As Zeora's family keeps animals, as Dexias and his sister trade, I and the other priestesses remember, for our gods and for our people, what happened before any of us were born, and we look ahead sometimes, to see the future."

 

 

 

*

 

Silthri walked back slowly, her head feeling as if it might burst with all the memories of her full day. Tirano the priestess had given her a warm blessing and a small rounded clay figurine-bead of a plump, fertile seated woman who would have been, if standing, as tall as Silthri's smallest finger. Zeora, her new friend ---I have a friend! thought Silthri, savoring the unexpected delight--- had told her they would see each other at the Watering-ford the next morning, and given her a pot of yogurt, an enthusiastic embrace, and directions home. Now she walked back over the roofs, a small treasure in each hand, full to bursting.

Suddenly, the house she sought lay before her, the three handprints dark on the small second storey. Dexias sat on the roof, holding something in his hand that flashed a dazzling patch of light when he turned it. Seeing him there, handsome in the sunlight, realizing that she called his house home, that she saw him as home, Silthri's heart hurt her with a sharp-happy pain like deflowering, and she ran to him, careless of anything but getting home. Dexias looked up to see her and smiled, and his wonderful smile was too much to bear; all of her day, the fear and frustration and friendship and delight, rushed back onto Silthri in an overwhelming wave, and as she reached him she burst into tears and threw herself on him.

"Silthri? Silthri?" It took a few moments for her to hear Dexias through the storm of her tears; she came back to herself with her face buried in the crook of his neck, his necklace up over her head, her arms tight around his chest, his arms up around her back. She nodded, and he stroked her hair until she could stop crying and peel herself from him, kneeling beside him and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

"I'm sorry---" they both said, and looked at each other, and Dexias started to laugh, till Silthri caught the laughter. "I'm sorry," he said, smiling, and kissed her brow. "I thought the adventure would be good for you."

"No, no, it was, it was." Silthri held up her hands, showing him the contents. "I had a very good day on my way home. I have to tell you about it. It's just that, I just, I just realized that..." Her chin wanted to turn down, but for once she forced it up, forced herself to keep her eyes open and on his hazel eyes. "I realized that I was looking for this house because it's my home. I want to be Orani's sister. I want, I want to marry you."

Dexias's hazel eyes grew till they filled all Silthri's vision, as he gently dropped the object he held into her lap and laid his hands on hers and kissed her warmly. His hands slid up her arms as he kept kissing her, as she fell into the kiss, as she flew, wrapped in his arms.

Some passing boys hooted, and Silthri broke off the kiss, hiding her burning face in Dexias' chest. He shouted, "be off, you ticks!" in a cheerful voice, and the boys ran off laughing; then he laid his hand on Silthri's cheek, murmuring into her hair, "I've been waiting for those words, hoping for them, since I first saw you walk to me. Thank you, beloved."

Silthri pressed her face to his hand. "Thank you, beloved." The word tasted like wild grapes, like honey, like life. "Thank you for my new life." She opened her eyes, about to turn her face up to his, and saw for the first the object he'd dropped in her lap: a palm-sized circle of obsidian, dulled around the edges, so polished on its face that when she picked it up she could see her surprised face in it, the face she had only ever seen in still water. "What is this?"

"This is a mirror. Your mirror, to be precise. In two days you'll have a comb, too." Silthri turned her face up to Dexias now, and he grinned at her. "I love you, my Silthri. Now, shall we go inside?"

"Inside? It's a warm afternoon---"

"Or, we could lie together up here. The whole City wants to see more of the pretty new lady, from what I've heard today." Dexias waggled his eyebrows, and Silthri giggled, pressing her hand to mouth. "You are a beast," she said lovingly, and, gathering up her treasures, climbed down into the house as fast as she could.


	3. Dawn City, Chapter Three

**Chapter Three.**

Snuggled next to a blissfully snoring Dexias, too happy to sleep, Silthri lay awake. Had she only left R'chue half a month ago? It seemed like a lifetime. The Moon was full now, shining through the mat covering the skylight, washing the entire house in a soft dreamlike light; Silthri wondered if she truly were awake. Perhaps she had dreamed the entire trip, and she'd wake in R'chue between two of Hadinis' children, wrapped in her old hide dress.

She hoped not. As a talisman against that, Silthri ran back through the memories of her wedding day: of the hot veiled glances she and Dexias had exchanged all day, and the happily frantic preparations just before sunset; of the festival dish Orani had prepared, with barley and snails and wild onions and a jointed rabbit, green peas sprinkled over; of being wound by Zeora and Orani into the magnificent embroidered linen dress and wrapped around with the red woolen sash, hung with fertile cowries at her wrists and shiny beads at her ankles and her statuette-bead at her neck, and then having her face painted with red ocher and dark-gray kohl. In the mirror she had hardly looked like herself, she'd looked like a maiden goddess, all her features glowing in their enhanced beauty.

Then, only then, did Zeora and Orani let her climb up to the roof to join Dexias, eager and handsome in his best kilt of leopard skin, circles of joining and binding painted in red and black on his limbs and his copper arm-bands polished till they gleamed like pieces of the sunset light. As the Sun slid below the horizon they took each other's hands, and as their friends surrounded them and sang, they danced their wedding.

Silthri had spun in the circle, Dexias' hands warm around her own, spiraling into his arms. She had been nervous that day, thinking of the rite and her own shyness, but when she danced it had set her blood afire, lifting her out of herself, binding the whole rite together, binding them together, binding the world together once more, and the movement of their bodies together, lying together as their friends sang and clapped, felt nothing but natural, felt like just more dancing. She had come back to herself, Dexias in her arms, her own scream ringing in her ears, to open her eyes and see Orani standing at her head with a delighted grin and, above her, the Moon fully open and bright, the Sky-god blessing their union with his gaze. Silthri looked up at all their friends and at the sky above, and thought she might die of happiness.

Her heart pounded again in the dimness, with the rhythm of the dance. Silthri brushed her fingers over Dexias' brow, looking at him by the soft light of the Moon. Looking at her husband. The thought filled her with joy till she wanted to laugh aloud for sheer happiness, spilling over with it like a spring. Dexias was her husband. She was his wife. Orani was her sister. She had found the place where she belonged.

Her hand still cradling Dexias' brow, Silthri lay asleep beside him, a smile and the soft moonlight on her face.

  
*

  
In the days that followed Silthri found herself nearly as in love with Lillun as she was with Dexias and Orani. She tried to work hard for them, cleaning the house, grinding acorns for rinsing and pounding wheat and barley to hull them, treading the clothes at the Washing Ford on the further branch of the River, learning how to help her new family at their trading livelihood, keeping the large bin of trade-grain and the smaller household bins of wheat, barley, nuts, peas and acorns clean and free of vermin; Dexias and Orani exclaimed over how much work she did, and cried out that she was their family, not their drudge, but to Silthri her life was a holiday compared to her days in R'chue, where the other women kept her busy from dawn to dusk with all the chores they didn't want to do. In the City there were chores she never had to do, simply because they could trade a bucketful of grain or a palmful of dates or a shellful of pigment for an already-dressed hide or a hank of spun thread or a chunk of obsidian. Just as Dexias and Orani traded for their living, so did other families turn animals into meat and hides and thread, or hammer and cast metals into jewelry, or carve wood and horn into useful things, or tend the Wheat Field and the Barley Field, the Pea Field and the Mixed Patch down by the Riverbanks. Silthri was just learning who did what, and sometimes despaired of ever knowing every family's work, but found herself delighted by how much more any family could get done when it didn't have to do everything.

In the mornings Silthri worked at household chores; most afternoons Orani either pushed her up the ladder or pulled her up it, and out into the City she went. Silthri met other priests and priestesses, of the Earth Mother and the other deities, the Bull-Lord and the Maiden of Spring, the Shaper and the Singer and Dancer; she sat inside the splendid gods' houses, bringing her offerings and learning the wise men and women's wisdom while they tended the shrines and wove the careful, fine cloth that only such wise people had the patience to make. Other days, she met Zeora and through her more friends, Adeo and Zaton and Osani, Zatori and Enas; they gently teased Silthri for her accent, played knucklebones and danced, and gathered herbs and eggs and small animals from the groves and grasslands outside the city, and some days they even gathered at Silthri's house, chattering to Orani as she wove on the roof. Sometimes Silthri would visit Amras and Olas-the-lesser as they grazed their family's flock; she always felt a little guilty at that, for both young men still competed at courting her as if she weren't married, which made her feel uncomfortable and flattered both. Often, she would go with Orani to wash clothes or trade for things their household needed, to visit Orani's solemn son of six years, who lived with his father's family, or just for walks round the City for no other reason than to visit with friends and flirt with men and enjoy being beautiful young women in a city.

Seven days after the wedding, Dexias kissed his sister and his new wife farewell for a few days. One of the trading trips was going out, taking the wealth of obsidian that the Double Mountain had recently thrown up out to bring back riches, and he needed to go with it. Silthri stood on the roof watching him till he was out of sight, chiding herself for acting as if he were vanishing forever, but watching him with tears on her cheeks nonetheless.

As if on cue, she woke early the next morning to find blood on her thighs; in all the excitement of her new life she had forgotten to count days. She jumped up with a shriek, and Orani sat up sleepily, pushing curls out of her eyes. "Silthri?"

"My moon-days---I forgot---Orani---I'm sorry---" Silthri looked down at herself and then at the bed-furs in dismay, turning them over as Orani climbed slowly out of the bed. "I didn't, I didn't---"

"The furs look fine, child," said Orani, patting Silthri calmingly. "Wash yourself. We'll live."

An even more alarming thought struck Silthri, and she jumped to the chest where she kept her few belongings; just as she'd worried, her moon-belt wasn't there. Nitilis had not packed it. "I don't have---"

"Here, use this." Orani handed Silthri a finger of sponge. "It doesn't even need a belt, it's much better."

A few minutes later, a chagrined Silthri threw a basketful of bloody water into the nearest midden. Orani was amused by the whole situation, although she said that now they needed to go trade for a sponge for Silthri, and that they were rather expensive. Silthri considered the matter, as the piece of sponge shifted unfamiliarly within her; it felt odd, but it _was_ better than a belt.

Orani was right about the expense, too. The canny old man with the sponges was alone in his house, as his sons were both traders off with Dexias and his daughters-by-marriage were out; as well as a bucket each of mixed grain and of acorns _and_ four dried fish, he also demanded a kiss from each woman. Orani rolled her eyes, called him "grandfather", and seemed to take it all in stride, but Silthri was afraid, afraid as he clutched her with his still-strong, wiry arms, and afraid afterwards as she walked back to her house, the fist-sized sponge in one hand and the old man's hide buckets in the other. What would Dexias say? Would he be angry with her?

"What worries you?" asked Orani, filling the acorn bucket. "You don't think Dexias will be upset?" Silthri nodded, still staring at the sponge in her hand, feeling more and more as if she might cry. "He's a practical man, and he loves you." Orani put down the buckets to embrace Silthri, who rested her cheek on Orani's breasts, willing the knot inside her to relax. "Besides, it was just a kiss. You can tell him I kissed the old ram as well." Orani waggled her eyebrows, and Silthri couldn't help but giggle; even so, she still had to ask, "are you sure he won't be angry?"

"He's my brother," said Orani, letting go to pick up the buckets. "If he's angry with you I'll kick him, how's that?" That thought made Silthri laugh till she couldn't worry any more. "Meanwhile. While I'm gone, cut that sponge up into fingers that look comfortably small; it should make about eight or nine, I think. Wrap them up and put them in your chest. That should last awhile before we have to go kiss Grandfather again."

  
*

  
The next day, Silthri was hanging her bags of acorn flour in the stream at the Acorn Ford, when a shadow fell over her. She looked up to see a woman about five or six years her elder standing over her, wearing a lambskin dress, her hands on her hips. The woman had her long brown hair wound around her head, and strings of beads dangling from holes in her ears, and she looked unfriendly. "So, how do you like it?"

"How do I like what?" asked Silthri shortly. The second of her moon-days was always the worst, heavy and painful, so she was already in an unpleasant mood, and she found herself disliking this mysterious woman on sight.

"Being half a wife, having a husband who is half there." The woman smiled unpleasantly. "It must be better than wherever you came from was, though."

Suddenly Silthri knew who she was. "I like being Dexias' wife, very much," she said, calling up her stepmother's firm voice as she climbed to her feet. The woman was on the tall side, a head taller than Silthri, but she put her own hands on her hips and stood her ground, staring up into the unfriendly blue eyes. "I love him, and I love Orani. They told me about you."

"I'm sure they did, _child_." Dexias' former wife looked not at all daunted. "I hope you love it as much in a year of lying alone half the time." With that she turned on her heel and strode off. "He told me I am a much better wife," muttered Silthri under her breath as she sat heavily back down.

"I see you met Eligo." Orani came up the bank with the basket of clothes they were going to repair while they waited for the acorn flour to rinse. "Sweet, isn't she?"

"Like an unleached acorn," replied Silthri, smiling up at Orani, already feeling better.

  
*

  
The day after the half-moon Dexias came home so laden he was almost bent double under his pack, hung as it was with its extra bags of trade-grain and nuts. Silthri nervously waited for the right moment to tell him about the kiss she'd traded, but as soon as he'd calmed down from bragging to Orani about his good luck, he took one look at Silthri and asked, mild as fresh milk, "did you lie with someone while I was gone?"

"No!" cried Silthri, shocked, as Orani laughed. "Oh, no, brother. We had to buy a sponge from Grandfather Adelen, and that rotten old dried fish made us kiss him."

"Is that all?" Dexias laughed and wrapped his arms around Silthri, kissing her deeply. "There, now your mouth is cleansed again. I love you, Silthri; did you think I'd be cross with you for that?"

"I didn't, I didn't know." Silthri buried her face in his chest, willing herself not to cry with relief. "I think you two should talk," observed Orani. "As well as share other familiarities," she added on her way up the ladder, so that Silthri could hear the wink in her voice. "I'll go see Ranas and my son."

Dexias laughed at that, and kissed his wife again, guiding Silthri over to the sleeping platform. "Have you met any men you want to lie with?"

Silthri thought. There were some young men she was consistently flirting with, not least Amras, but she mostly thought of that as making friends. Maybe she shouldn't be so forward. "No," she finally answered.

"There will be, I'm sure," said Dexias warmly. Silthri looked up at him, opening her mouth to protest, but he went on, smiling. "You are beautiful, and you are young, and you have hot blood when you let it loose, as I should know." He waggled his eyebrows at her, and she giggled. "You are my wife, but you still own yourself, I don't own you. If you want to lie with someone, just ask me first. Although I _would_ like it if you caught a child for me before you do."

Silthri nodded. "Thank, thank you. I can't imagine----"

"Wanting anyone else? Oh, you will. That doesn't mean you won't still love me. After all, it would be selfish of me to keep the beautiful Silthri all to myself." Silthri couldn't help but grin at that. "I should have told you this before."

"Are all husbands, are all marriages here like this?" Dexias tilted his head thoughtfully, considering the question. "It's how my mother's marriages were; it's the most widespread custom, I think. Some husbands are more jealous than others, but, I think, living this way is more sensible, with how people are." He kissed her again, one hand undoing her leather girdle. "And now, since I neglected to give you permission, and since all the women I saw on this trip looked like glow bugs by the star of your face, we have both not lain with anyone since I left. Maybe we should make up for that." Silthri smiled at that, unfastening his kilt as she tilted her face up to his.

*

  
The next time a large trading trip left, Dexias did not go with them. It was full summer, and the women had just danced the Summerdance, when Silthri counted and realized that she had not had her moondays, so he waited with her, to see if she really had caught his child; besides, his last trip had been so fruitful that he could afford to not go. So he stayed home, trading and repairing his kit and enjoying relatively indolent days, and enjoying nights with Silthri.

One hot summer afternoon Silthri swayed up the path to her house, carrying a pitched basket of water on her head and talking to Zeora about her upcoming wedding to Tiron. Privately, Silthri wondered if Zeora were old enough, at thirteen, to marry, but she certainly looked ripe enough and was eager enough. "Are you going to wear your pretty linen dress?" asked Zeora, adjusting the clay jar on her head. Silthri laughed a bit. "No, how could I do that? I wore it to my own wedding. This time, you're the one being married."

"Silthri!" She turned, slowly because the basket was heavy, to see Dexias with their friend Zaton, a wiry, blue-eyed young man about Orani's age who was an excellent mural painter and statuette maker; his father had been a priest of the Shaper, whose magic was said to flow from Zaton's fingertips. When they saw Silthri, the two young men ran up over the roofs, and took the water basket from her. "Be careful," Dexias admonished, and Silthri laughed cheerfully. "I'm fine!"

"You can carry my water-jar," offered Zeora, and the other three laughed. "You're not pregnant yet," retorted Zaton, and Zeora made a rude face at him and set off towards her house. Dexias surrendered the water-basket back to Silthri, and the men slowed their walking to keep pace with her; she noticed that Zaton carried a bundle of clothing. "Zaton, what befell?"

"I'm coming to stay with you for the forty days," he replied, and Silthri patted his arm with one hand, steadying her basket with the other. "I am sorry, then." That meant that Zaton's mother had finally died, and he and his sister and her husband and children were leaving their home for the forty ritual days after burying their mother beneath one of the sleeping platforms. Zaton shrugged and smiled. "She was in such pain, these last days; now she can sleep."

"Is your whole family coming to stay with us?" Silthri had a flash of worry; their home was spacious enough, but not the largest house in Lillun by far, and the addition of two men, one woman, and three children would take it from snug to tight. Zaton and Dexias laughed at that, probably imagining the same picture Silthri did, of people tumbling over each other. "Oh, no. Elta has gone to Angol's mother's house. I just thought I would take the chance to come visit. Dexias still owes me for last spring's muralling."

"I do not, you cheat!" cried Dexias with mock indignation. "You are going to owe me this spring's muralling, and you know it." Silthri stood between them as they pretended to strike at each other, and laughed, her heart light thought the water-basket was heavy.

*

  
Dexias left Zaton with Orani and Silthri when he went on his next trip, whispering to Silthri that she might lie with him if she liked. Her only response was a flaming blush; he laughed knowingly and kissed her once more. This time, Dexias had hit with the first blow; Silthri _did_ desire Zaton, who was slender and cheerful with a tasty touch of wildness; he'd spent his time there shaping statuettes to bake in the oven and flirting with both Orani and Silthri, sometimes at the same time. Silthri was sure by now that she was pregnant, and for some reason, it was making all the hotter, till her skin could barely stand to be covered by clothes, till she noticed every passing man. Dexias had teased her that he _had_ to leave for a trip or she'd exhaust him. Now, as she folded her new dress, a plain one of pale grey linen, her eye fell on Zaton, lying on the other sleeping platform; it was a hot night, and he boldly lay as bare as he'd been born, and caught her eye, and winked.

"Well?" asked Orani cheerfully, and laughed at the "huh?" that was Silthri's reply. "Do you want to go lie with him, or shall I?" Silthri blushed till her face burned, and Orani laughed again, kissed her on the cheek, and sauntered across the room, waving her wide hips. Silthri curled up, winding a corner of the linen coverlet around her ears, and tried not to listen to them, as her skin burned and her thighs grew wet with her desire to be over with them.

"Silthri?" She didn't know how she'd fallen asleep, but she had; Zaton's whisper woke her. "Silthri, may I get in?"

"I thought you were sleeping with Orani?" Silthri drew the sheet up around herself as if its touch could satisfy her hot skin. Zaton's young teeth shone in the dimness, the one missing tooth leaving a rakish gap. "She said you looked lonely and she wanted the bed to herself," he replied.

"Oh. But how, how are you not asleep?"

"How could I sleep with such a beautiful woman lonely in the same house?"

Silthri could have laughed at that. "Oh, get in, you flatterer," she said, amused, and held out her arms to him.

  
*

  
"So which of us do you like better to lie with?" Dexias asked, apropos of nothing. Silthri turned over in bed to look at him, and when she saw his grin, she slapped his shoulder gently with false anger. "Do you think I'd answer that? You're still my husband, which should tell you what you need to know."

Then, thinking on it, more soberly she asked him, "why are you so easy on this? You all but handed me to Zaton. Not that I am upset," she added, as he looked up with concern, "but not everyone's husband is so easygoing."

"Because I like women with warm blood, and I don't like making the same mistakes." Dexias laid his hand over Silthri's where it rested over his heart. "I know you've met Eligo." Silthri nodded; since their meeting at the Acorn Ford she had seen Dexias' former wife a few times around the City, and each time the woman had flashed her such a look of hate that soon after Silthri knew she was pregnant she traded not a few items for a large bead of shining sky-blue turquoise, which she sewed onto her everyday leather girdle to protect the baby from the Evil Eye. Dexias sighed, looking rather sad, and not so young. "She hates me. She hates me because when I was so often gone she filled her loneliness with friendships with other men, and she hadn't asked me first, and when I found out I was--- I struck her, and said many cruel things to her. She left me, and when I went to apologize she wouldn't hear it. So things stand between us, from then to now."

Silthri laid her other hand on his brow as if to wipe away the pain. "She should have asked. And she should have taken your apology."

"She should have asked, and I meant the apology, but I should not have been cruel to her. I don't ever want to be cruel to you."

Silthri opened her mouth to try to reply to this with all the love and gratitude in her heart, but was interrupted by Orani's snort. "The woman has an unleached acorn for a heart," Orani called from the other sleeping platform, and Silthri started giggling.

"Hello, Miss Long-ears," replied Dexias snidely. "If you're becoming a rabbit, may I make a pouch from your fur?"

"You know I'm right," she called back; Silthri buried her face in Dexias' shoulder till her giggles subsided. "I think I agree with Orani," she whispered in his ear.

"That's only because you both love me," he retorted, and she could feel his smile.

  
*

  
The seasons of Silthri's pregnancy swung around; trading and the summer grain and pea harvests, the autumn harvest of sweet white-oak acorns, the time to kill lambs and dry their meat in strips before the winter rains. Her breasts grew, the veins standing out in blue on pink, and so did her hips and rump; Silthri felt vast and swollen, but Dexias and Amras and Zaton all liked the plumpness on her, as did the young men who perennially favored her with howls and whoops as she moved through the City. Zeora was pregnant as well, and the two girls sat together and talked about the magic strangeness of feeling the life growing inside you, where Zeora's mothers and Orani and their friends who had already had children couldn't hear them and laugh and tease.

The first time the baby moved within her Silthri embarrassed herself by crying out with surprise and joy, so that Dexias and Orani froze and turned to look at her. Blushing, she explained that she could feel the baby's soul stretch its wings and start to flutter; Orani cried out and clapped her hands, and Dexias lunged up out of bed to wrap his arms around Silthri and kiss her, crushing the air out of her for a moment before he let go. His hazel eyes shone like sunset on the River as he looked at her. "Now we may pick a name."

Blackberry barked, wanting to share in the excitement, and Silthri bent to pick her up. Zaton had given the puppy to them, because they dealt in grains, and her dam had taught her to hunt mice. "Yes, Blackberry," said Dexias as he rubbed the dog behind her ears, "but we can't name the baby 'ark-ark'"; Silthri laughed and asked, "may we name him Dexias?"

"If the child's a boy." Dexias thought about it, stroking Blackberry. "I think the poor child deserves his own name," put in Orani from the kitchen.

"One related to his father's, though." Silthri laid a hand on her stomach as the gentle fluttering came again. "Where is your name from, Dexias? Since I came here I haven't heard others like it."

"That's because my father was from the Xianon, a tribe from the Black-shine Mountain. By the time he came here with his family there weren't many of the tribe left, so names like mine are rare. Even so, I am of Lillun. Orani's father, the man who raised me, was from Lillun, I'd rather my son have a name of Lillun." Blackberry wiggled, and Silthri put her down.

"How about Sian, then?" called Orani. "Who better to name your son after than my father?"

"Or Siano if we have a girl." Dexias grinned. "Not bad, my sister."

"Not bad? Better than you did! What do you think, Silthri?"

The child within her seemed to flutter its assent; Silthri nodded. "I like it."

  
*

  
The house was dark, the skylights covered against the winter rains. Only a little light filtered in through the wet matting, but Silthri didn't mind; the darkness was restful.

She needed the rest. First babies are almost always most difficult, Mother Irano had told her several times, but Silthri felt as if she had traded for her rather pleasant pregnancy with a hard, long labor. Two whole days of it, and more than once she'd wondered if she really might die. So had Dexias, who had put on a brave face for Silthri, but his eyes were wide and wet, and more than once she had woken from feverish birthing dreams to hear him quietly, fervently praying to not lose her as he had lost his first wife.

Silthri had not been lost. With Irano as midwife and Orani holding her up, both women singing to her and the baby, Silthri had brought forth her daughter, a strong little baby with a thatch of dark ruffly hair and a loud cry. Orani dug a hole beneath the hearth to bury the afterbirth, then filled it in and rekindled the fire, while Dexias lay curled around his wife and daughter, gently keeping them warm, and now gently snoring.

"Men," said Orani with weary cheer, washing her hands in the basin. "To look at him you'd think he'd done the birthing." Silthri smiled, too weary to giggle, holding Siano, who now lay asleep in her arms, after sucking heartily. Orani kissed Silthri on her forehead and fell onto the other platform, where Irano was already asleep, leaving Silthri in the dimness with her baby daughter.

She should have been asleep, but all she could do was look at her new baby, hold the little warm child in her tired arms, noting how the damp hair crimped as it dried into curls like Dexias's, how it stayed black like her own. Silthri counted those ten fingers and ten toes again, looked at the tied-off stump and the little round cheeks and the wide damp eyelids. Her ten-fingered, ten-toed, perfect little baby, who waved her little arms and crinkled her face when uncovered, so Silthri wrapped the baby up in a corner of the linen sheet and laid her head down beside her, both of them resting on Dexias' chest. Silthri, only newly sixteen, looked from her baby to her husband, then closed her eyes, warmly holding and being held by her future.  


 


	4. Dawn City, Chapter Four

  
**Chapter Four**

Four and a half years later, Silthri stood in the early morning with Siano's hand in hers, atop the highest roof in Lillun, looking out towards the Double Mountain. Siano stood very still for such a little child, confining her fidgeting to twisting and untwisting her necklace of pigment-stained clay beads; her unborn sibling was not so quiet, doing what felt like flips in Silthri's womb. Together, mother and daughter watched the sun rise between the peaks of the distant mountain until it was too bright to look at anymore.

As they turned to return home, Siano squeezed her mother's hand. "Thank you, Mama. I haven't seen Sister Sun since before I took sick."

Silthri smiled at her daughter. "I am sure She missed you, too. When we get home you need to go right back to bed, or you'll get sick again. All right?" Siano nodded, her curly black hair bobbing around her serious little face, and Silthri bent and kissed her, just because.

Unfortunately, as they approached their house they could hear that no sleep would be had yet. Their unpleasant neighbor Golas was already up and roaring at his hapless wife and daughter, while his wife's sister screamed back, vowing that this was the day she would drive him forth from her house. She'd screamed that nearly every day since the springtime, when her sister's family had given up on their disintegrating house and moved in with her. It had been during the Time of Replastering, when everyone was very busy cleaning their homes, repairing bricks that had deteriorated during the wet winter and covering the houses insides and out with white plaster, and so everyone was weary and short-tempered; Orani had gone to their house to ask them to stop arguing so loudly, and the next day Golas had stuck his head into their trapdoor, shouted, "hey, bitch!" at Orani, and flung a clod of mud at her. It hit the wall, and the dark mark could still be seen on the plaster. Zaton had painted it cleverly into the eye of a spiral, but Silthri could still see it, and it bothered her. It bothered them all.

Dexias seemingly shrugged off their blustering neighbor as a consequence of city living, but he always made sure that a man was staying with his family when he went away; Orani looked troubled and spoke tartly, and Silthri felt so nervous down in the pit of her stomach that she could barely even sleep in the house anymore. When she asked her neighbors, down by the River or while trading, they confided their worries to her, and their unhappinesses mirrored hers. Every family argued sometimes, but Golas's family was different somehow, leaking foulness all around them. Still, he hadn't _done_ anything precisely against the ways of the City; all he had done, really, was to yell at everyone. What could they all do about him?

Now Golas was at it again, shouting in the morning. At least he wasn't shouting in the middle of the night this time. As soon as she reached the bottom of the ladder Siano covered her ears and whimpered, and Silthri wrapped her arms around her daughter and sat down on one platform, rocking her and crooning. Blackberry crept over to curl up with them, whining, and Silthri stroked the distressed dog.

Orani came to sit with them, too, wrapping her arms around Silthri and Siano, and when Dexias returned he took one look at his family, miserably huddling, and said "this has got to stop." Then he took a deep breath and shouted it at the top of his lungs, "THIS HAS GOT TO STOP!"

"Shut your noise!" they heard Golas bawl back, but then they heard him climb up and leave his house; he stomped over their roof on his way, then was gone. Dexias shook his head. "I think we need to ask the elders what to do."

"I only said that four months ago," snapped Orani; Silthri could feel her shaking beneath the anger. Dexias knew his sister, and he came to her to embrace her, saying "It wasn't enough then. I think it will be now." He leaned over to kiss Silthri and Siano on their brows, and to stroke Blackberry. "I'm going to go talk to a few of our neighbors, to see who will come with me."

"Try Iltas-the-Red and Ostha, and Golo and Tei and their husbands," suggested Silthri; Dexias nodded and climbed out into the morning, and Orani got up to do the necessary morning tasks, but Silthri kept rocking her daughter, praying fervently to the Mother that somehow they could be rid of their dreadful neighbor. Later in her life she would often wonder if there were such a thing as praying all too fervently.

  
*

Half a month later Silthri and Orani came home, singing happily together with Siano clapping her hands to keep time, their hide pails full of sweet white acorns. The sweet-acorned white oaks were rarer than the red, whose acorns needed leaching, but this year the groves of white oaks that lay north of the City were having a mast year; all the women of the City were bringing their offerings for the generous oak-spirit and leaving with pailfuls of sweet acorns to keep for the winter.

Dexias was home when they got there, smiling from ear to ear. "I have news, my family," he said, his eyes twinkling.

"What news?" cried Silthri, as Orani put her hands on her hips and laughed. "I think I know!"

"I think our problem will be going away." Dexias grasped Silthri's hands. "The elders met last night, and Olthas came to tell me what they decided. They're going to ask _him_ \---"the jerk of Dexias' head told who---"to build himself a house on the City's edge, and leave Tenao be. Not to mention his neighbors."

"Wonderful! Oh, wonderful!" Silthri kissed Dexias, squeezing his hands, and danced, turning to Siano to clap her hands. "The loud man is going to go!" she told her daughter, who smiled ear to ear and danced with her mother.

Before they could celebrate further they all heard Golas's bellow. "This is MY home, and I won't leave it!" Silthri giggled, pressing her hand over her mouth when Dexias made a shushing motion as he tilted his head up to listen. Several men pleaded with him to "not make this difficult," but his carrying bellow rose over all their voices. "I know who put you mice up to this!" His heavy footstep thudded onto their roof. "Get up here, she-puppy!"

"Call me a puppy, will that turd?" Orani's eyes flashed, and she ran up the ladder, Dexias following her. "No, don't go up!" cried Silthri, dread flaring within her, but the trap door fell on her words. She heard Orani run across the roof, shouting; then she heard Orani scream.

"Stay here!" Silthri told her daughter urgently; round-eyed, Siano nodded, her little hands clutched together, and Silthri climbed up as fast as she could, her heart pounding within her. She opened the trap door and gasped.

Orani lay on her side, looking dazed, holding her head. Further away, on his sister-by-marriage's roof, Golas was confronting Dexias, the men who had come with the elders' message behind him, and Silthri realized with horror that the gray thing he waved was an ingot of lead, and that Dexias had his knife in his hand.

"Stop them!" Silthri screamed, or thought she screamed, but no one paid her heed, as she froze in place, for that terrible eternal moment as Dexias dove in, his knife a black streak in the sunlight that plunged into Golas's chest; staggering back, Golas still swung his lead cudgel, and the thud as it hit Dexias's curly head resounded in Silthri's ears. Golas snarled, leaning forward, and clubbed Dexias again as he fell; then the gush of blood from his chest suddenly grew to a gout, and Golas, surprise on his face, fell to his knees and then over flat.

"No! No no no no no no no!" Silthri heard a woman screaming, and belatedly realized that she heard her own voice, as she tripped over her own feet, struggling to run to her husband, running past Orani on her knees, stumbling over the drop to the next roof, praying as she ran, to which god she didn't know. Dexias lay on his side, spattered with blood, blood pooling under his head, his eyes closed and the knife loose in his hand. "No!" cried Silthri, dropping to her knees beside him. It seemed all she could say. "No, no, no!"

More women were screaming. Hearing the commotion, Golas's wife and her sister Tenao had climbed to the roof; Golas's wife, her skirt covered with blood, rose from wailing over her husband to run over to Silthri. "Your husband has killed mine!"

Silthri threw herself protectively over Dexias, glaring up at the woman, unable to speak for the rush of words that jammed in her mouth. 'He attacked my husband! He struck our sister!' she wanted to shriek, along with every curse she knew. 'He was nothing but bad for everyone since you came here!' But the words stuck in her mouth, which had gone grass-dry, perhaps from all the tears running from her eyes.

Dexias quivered, and Silthri forgot the woman, turning to him as Orani fell to her knees beside him. He wasn't coming around; instead, he was starting to shake, and she could see his eyes rolling back behind his lids. For the first time Silthri thought, he is dying, he is dead, and felt the darkness behind those words surge forward to swallow her mind. Orani stared at her prone brother, then lurched to her feet and staggered past Silthri, screaming all the words Silthri had wanted to and more, and Golas's wife shrank back. "You have brought nothing but evil here!" cried Orani, and Silthri saw the knife flashing black in her hand, and shoved back the darkness and leaped to catch Orani. "No!" It seemed all she could say, this horrible day. "No, don't, Orani. Don't! Before all these people! You'll be exiled!" Silthri wrapped her arms around Orani, struggling to hold her, as Orani strained towards Golas's wife and Tenao, standing behind her as still as a stone. "Don't! I need you! Orani! I cannot live, cannot live through this day without you."

Those words made Orani blink. She turned her head to look at Silthri, her eyes wet and unseeing, and Silthri could see the great bruise along one side of her face, before Orani crumpled in tears. Silthri didn't know how she wasn't collapsed in tears herself, as she held Orani and they sank back down beside Dexias, whose shaking was getting worse and worse. His whole body shook now as if it would shake to pieces. Tenao was dragging her weeping sister back down into the house, and the men were finally moving, slow with shock, to attend to the fallen men and their families, as Silthri and Orani clutched each other and helplessly watched Dexias shudder.

Three of the men lifted Dexias, while another took Silthri and Orani by the arm to raise them, wrapping his arms around them to steady them and walking them gently back to their house. "Hold his head steady," he called; recognizing his voice, Silthri glanced up with the last shred of her thought to see that it was Amras who was supporting her. Grateful for his friendship, she squeezed his hand while unwrapping his arm from her waist, stepping forward, leaving Orani in his hands. Someone had to open the trap door, and someone had to hold Siano.

  
*

  
Silthri sat on the sleeping platform beside Dexias. He was curled up the way children lie in the womb, lying so that the broken side of his head was hidden, dressed in his leopard-skin kilt and his traders' necklaces and his shining armbands. She and Orani and Tirano the priestess had dressed him, after he died, after it was clear that none of their prayers would avail, after the life faded out of him as the tremors receded. Siano had cried, and asked why her Dada would not wake up, and had shaken her head at the answer and cried all the more; she had finally fallen asleep the way children do, limp with exhaustion, and she lay in Orani's arms on the other sleeping platform. Silthri knew better than to think that Orani slept.

It was dawn, light starting to spill over through the open trapdoor. Blackberry lay by the hearth, her head on her paws. Silthri sat beside her husband, her hand on his damp curly hair; she and Orani had washed it as best they could, but all the water in their house had merely left it and their hands sticky with diluted blood. Silthri sat, remembering tiny shards of the last day, cold as stone. There was so much to do, so much, but all she wanted was to be buried beside her husband when they opened the platform and laid him in it. Laid him beside his mother, sent him to join Torian, the baby they had buried, to meet Enitheris her stepmother. Silthri sat, her hand on Dexias' hair, the dawn light dark before her eyes.

"Silthri? Silthri, dove, are you awake?" Zeora's familiar voice bubbled into Silthri's ears, till she forced her head to turn. Zeora stood on the ladder, her newest baby in her cloak; when Silthri looked up Zeora started to climb down, Zaton and Adeo behind her. "Silthri, I just heard, I'm so sorry!" Blackberry ran up to the intruders, but, recognizing them all as frequent visitors, let them come down into the house.

Silthri let herself be held, let Zeora hold her and babble sympathetically to her; across the room she could hear Orani kiss Zaton and start to weep again in his arms, but Silthri couldn't weep. She felt nothing but emptiness; even the child within her lay still.

  
*

  
They buried Dexias that evening at sunset. Silthri found herself standing before his sleeping platform, now excavated by Amras and Zaton and Ranas; looking down past her ash-painted arms at him as he lay curled up as if asleep, except for the dark stickiness in his hair. She bent and kissed that ruddy cheek one last time, on the crest of his cheekbone, and stood to look at him again; as Tirano sang a rolling stream of beautiful words, commending his spirit to the Mother and the Shaper and the Stars, as Zaton and Ranas and Orani and Orani's son Ziin sang the words of farewell, as all the ritual of the burial washed over her, Silthri stood and looked down at her husband. The part of her that was still a child wept and raged and prayed that if she just stared at him long enough he would move and sit up and look at them all with surprise; the part of her that was a woman stood as if made of stone, looking at the man she had gone to bed with just two sunsets ago, the father of the little girl who stood beside her and the child now fluttering within her, knowing she would not see him again until she too went over, missing him terribly already.

Siano and Orani had to throw the first handfuls of earth in on the grave. Orani lifted the little girl and steadied her, and she bravely threw in the handful, then ran back to her mother and hid her face in her skirt. Silthri stroked her daughter's hair as she threw in her handful; then she kissed Siano and sent her back to Orani, and took a deep breath as the others threw in their handfuls. When Ranas and Zaton took up their auroch shoulder blades to do the heavy work of filling in the grave, Silthri began to sing.

She had not known what she would sing till she opened her mouth, but it poured forth from that hollow place within her, filling up her heart at the same time as it filled the air with music. She sang her first vision of Dexias, handsome and strong, and the graciousness and care he had shown her, the barrenness of the life he had brought her from and the City, lush with possibility, that he had brought her to. She sang all his family that he had told her of, all his journeys, all the world he had shown her in words. She sang Orani, his sister, now her sister, and Orani smiled at her, wet-eyed. She sang his final courage and her wish to grow old beside him, and her hope that he was entering the next world in joy, and her love for him.

The grave was full. They tamped the earth flat; Silthri fell silent. In forty days she and Orani would return to paint the platform white and resume their lives. In forty days, she thought. She turned away from the platform where Siano had been conceived, the earth which had engulfed her husband, and the house spun before her eyes.

Silthri came back to herself in Amras' arms; he had gone to his knees to catch her, holding her across his lap as she sat up. Zeora came bustling over with a cup of water; Silthri drank it, feeling the cool rough pottery in her hands as if it were the first real thing she had touched since that terrible morning. Everyone bustled around her for a stifling, vertigo-inducing moment till Orani cried, "give her air!" and they stood back.

Silthri carefully climbed off Amras' lap and stood on shaking legs. "You should eat", said Ranas, and "think of the baby!" cried Adeo, but Silthri just shook her head, and Orani came over to stand beside her, shaking her head more strongly. "She will eat when she's ready," Orani told them firmly. "Now, our forty days have begun. Who will take us in?

"Come back with us, Mama," said Ziin, "and bring my cousin Siano." Orani smiled at him and embraced him, glancing up at Ranas, who nodded. "Then I will. And Aunt Silthri?"

"Silthri can stay with me," said Amras as Zaton was opening his mouth; he held out his hand, and Silthri squeezed it and let her hand drop, shaking her head. "I will go with Orani and Siano," she said, her voice little more than a whisper. "And tonight I will stay here."

They all stared at her at that, individual arguments lost in a babble of voices. Silthri looked down at her arms, at the broad stripes of ash mixed with fat and painted in spirals. "Silthri," said Orani softly, "will you be, well, all right?"

"I will be all right." Silthri smiled up at Orani, and took her hand. "I will be fine. I just need a time to myself." Orani looked at her for a moment with eyes red but sharp and clear, then nodded and started shooing their friends out. Once Siano realized her mother was staying, however, she ran back to Silthri and clung to her leg. "Mama, stay with me!"

Silthri knelt to face her daughter. "I will only be away for the night, Siano. Please go with Aunt Orani for me."

"No!" Siano shook her head, the curly hair bouncing. "Dada left, and came back dead! No!"

Those words hurt. _Oh, child_ , Silthri thought. _Oh, my child_. "I will not die today."

"Promise?" A shining tear ran down Siano's cheek, but she kept her small chin up. Silthri wanted to shake her and praise her and hold her tightly all at once. "I promise you, Siano. I won't die." The little girl kissed her mother on the cheek, wrapping her arms almost choking-tight around Silthri's neck, then let go and ran to Orani, burying her face in her skirt, and kept her eyes down all the way up the ladder.

Amras paused beside Silthri, but before he could say anything she smiled and waved him off, turning away to gather up the linen sheet that the grave-soil had been heaped upon. Silthri folded it and laid it on the hearth, then added the bloodstained wool dresses that she and Orani had been wearing two days before As the house filled with the smoke and smell of burning cloth, Blackberry came whining to Silthri, who picked her up; the baby within Silthri responded to the motion with its own kicks. "And they worried I'd be alone," she told the dog, petting her as she stood out of the smoke's pathway and watched the cloth burn.

When the fire was down to embers Silthri poured the last of the water onto it to put it safely out, then picked up the bundle Zeora had packed for her, and gently shooed Blackberry before her as she climbed up out of the house, leaving it to Dexias and all those before him who were buried there.

  
*

  
Silthri sat up to watch the sunrise, looking out across the City. Blackberry slept beside her; Dexias slept inside the bed till he would wake elsewhere. The thought hurt, but Silthri could no more have not thought it than she could have not looked at the sunrise.

The baby kicked and danced. This one was much livelier than Siano or Torian had been. Silthri hoped this baby lived, her last possible child by Dexias. She hoped she'd be able to see him in this child.

Looking at the sunrise, Silthri thought about her future in Lillun. The man who had brought her to the City was gone. She had been hoping for a dream from him to guide her, but, like the day he let her walk home across the City, apparently this was a path she had to walk alone.

Part of her cried to leave the City, to leave the pain and memories behind, except...how could she, with her daughter needing her and a baby growing beneath her heart? Even if she could, where would she go? Silthri thought about the sunrise over R'chue, and thought of returning there, and shook her head. There was nothing for her there, and much for her in Lillun. Her friends, Zaton, Amras, Zeora, and Orani and her son's kin; besides, how could Silthri take Siano from the only world she knew? And how could she leave her?

Silthri stood, looking out across the City. Dexias had brought her to Lillun, and her future still lay in Lillun, even without Dexias at her side.

As she turned, she saw Tenao scrubbing her roof with a pailful of water and a big handful of rushes, more rushes in a bundle behind her. Tenao looked up at Silthri's movement, recognized her, and flinched, and the two women stared at each other.

Silthri's first, angry thought was to scream at Tenao, to curse her, to blame her for Dexias' death. If she hadn't let her sister move in.... but how could she refuse her own kin? How was she to know? Tenao was no more a diviner than Silthri. As if she knew her stepdaughter needed her, Enitheris seemed to whisper in Silthri's ear, "will cursing her bring back your husband?" Blackberry licked her hand, as if to agree.

Besides, Tenao looked punished enough, gray streaks starting in her straggling hair and blood dried and tracked across half her roof. Just as Silthri was trying to drag a smile to her face, Tenao, looking sad and ashamed; stood and bowed deeply. "Silthri, I---"

"It was a disaster not of your doing," said Silthri gently, walking closer. "I, I, I don't know what to say either."

"Thank you for not cursing me." Tenao looked so sad. Silthri had no heart for sadness; there had been far too much the last two days. "A curse won't bring my husband back." She reached out her hands to Tenao, who looked at her disbelievingly. "I, there, there's been enough, too much unhappiness." Tenao nodded, still wide-eyed with surprise, and Silthri looked down at the broad brown stain between their feet. "Are you cleaning before your, your forty days away?"

"I'm not _having_ forty days away," said Tenao bitterly; her anger was obviously not directed at Silthri, but its heat scorched her rawness, and she trembled, and Tenao looked at her more closely. "Oh, Silthri, you're shaking, have you eaten? Where is your family?"

"Gone ahead of me to stay with Orani's son's family. I needed a little, a little time to myself." Tenao nodded again, starting to smile as if it were painful but worthwhile. "Come inside and eat with me", she offered. "I'll deal with this roof later."

Silthri shook all the more, buffeted between gratitude and fear; even with her stepmother's spirit whispering in her ear, she didn't think she could be so cordial to Tenao's sister. Her fingernails still itched towards that woman's face. Tenao read that in her expression and smiled grimly. "My sister is not here. I wouldn't let her bury that--- bury _him_ here. He's buried in the midden. She went to stay with his family. She should have done that long ago. I'm just sorry she took my niece there with her. " Tenao sighed and shook her head, and smiled a bit more invitingly."I owe--- I would like to give you a meal."

Silthri smiled, the curve and stretch of her face feeling unfamiliar, but good. "I would like that," she said, and with Blackberry following, she went down into Tenao's house with her.  



	5. Dawn City, Chapter Five

**Chapter Five.**

"So, whom shall I marry?"

Silthri looked up at Orani, blinking with surprise. Up till that moment they had been discussing the upcoming winter, as they sat together on the roof waiting for Ranas to return with their children and his from the Trading Place. Now, in the same voice she had used to consider the worth of peas versus barley, Orani was asking about a radically different subject. "Marry?" was all Silthri could croak as she sat up, befuddled.

"Well, we _do_ need a man. I'm a trader woman, born and raised, and you've certainly taken to it. We can trade within the City, but to bring goods in we need a man who can go on caravans and other trading trips."

"But, but Dexias has only been dead a month---"

"And he wants us to remember him by becoming poor?" Orani smiled to take the sting from her words. "Be _practical_ , Silthri."

Silthri nodded, trying to think. "Zaton?" she suggested, and Orani fell over laughing. "Girl, we'd have to feed _him_! He's not a trader."

"He does well with the statuettes, and he's very busy every spring."

"Yes, but he does well within the City. Besides, he doesn't want to marry, as poor Adeo is finding. No, I'm fond of Zaton, but I think I won't marry him. I'll stay fonder of him that way."

"I'm all out of advice, then. You know better than I do." Silthri had not even known that Adeo was courting Zaton, but, knowing Adeo, who cultivated ordinariness like grain, Silthri could see why she wasn't succeeding.

Orani turned her head to look at the sky. "What do you think of Ranas?"

"He's solid." Silthri tried to think of other words, but they would not come. Ranas didn't speak much, really, at least not to adults; he seemed to have accepted Silthri, and obviously was fond of Siano, but that was really all she knew of him, she realized. "He's kind to children."

"He's a bit of a child himself," said Orani, still looking away. "In good ways. I had hoped you would suggest him, actually."

"So, suggest him yourself! As I said, you know more than I do." Silthri grinned at Orani, who turned her head and smiled back, encouraged. "What did you need my advice for?"

"I always want to know what you think. Besides.... Ten years ago, when I had just borne Ziin and his father had just died, Ranas asked me to marry him. I didn't want to, then. I found him, well, dull. Then I had that fever, so that was the end of children for me anyway, so I thought I would stay with Dexias and keep my freedom. Now, though.... Ranas has gone from dull to comfortable, or perhaps I have just gone from a girl to a woman, and especially since his wife Thei died, he and I have become friends. I dreamt of her, actually." Silthri leaned forward, as much as she could over her belly, anyway, to listen to Orani's dream. "She looked healthy, as she had never been, poor woman; death must be good for her. She smiled at me and handed me an unworked chunk of obsidian and said, 'make it beautiful'. I looked at it, and it shone, and then I woke."

"Well. I do not think that needs interpreting," Silthri smiled. "And Anin is not much more than a baby, so he should accept you."

"I hope so. I do well enough by him as an aunt, but still, a stepmother is different." Orani shook her head, then smiled. "The house will be full, with him, you, me, and four children. Can you stand that?"

Silthri laughed. "I think it will be a merry house, full of happiness."

*

"Let me help you with that." Amras came up behind Silthri to take the basketful of winnowed wheat off her head. After a moment of surprise she gratefully surrendered the heavy basket, and smiled up at him. "Thank you! I'm glad to see you!"

"I'm glad to see you too, Silthri." Amras' gaze was warm, caressing her body. "After we bring this back to your house, can you come back up to the roof and talk to me?"

Silthri was heavy enough with child that trudging up and down the ladder was becoming a larger and larger chore. "Is it important?"

"Yes, it's very important." Amras looked so eager, his dark eyes sparkling, that Silthri nodded. "I will, then."

Wheat safely stowed, Silthri hauled herself back up to the roof, where Amras stood, quivering with eagerness. "Silthri, I have such an important thing to ask you." Silthri wanted to reply 'so, ask me then,' but refrained and let him talk. "We have known each other for several years, and ever since I first saw you I have desired you. I foolishly married another woman, and that didn't last, because there is only one woman I should be married to. I love you, Silthri. You must marry me."

Silthri looked up at Amras. Was his face the face of her future? Her first thought was that she couldn't say that she loved him. He was so kind to her, though; he had supported her when Dexias had died and after, and he _had_ been her friend for years. Certainly, she could grow to love him? Besides, Orani had told her to be practical. "Yes, Amras, I will marry you."

"Oh, Silthri! Thank you!" Amras seized her, embracing her so tightly that her feet left the ground. "Amras! The baby!" she managed to cry, muffled against his chest, so that he would put her down again. "I am just so happy," Amras cried, and kissed Silthri, his hands holding her face to his. "Let's get your chest."

"You are a silly, dear man," Silthri laughed, gently disengaging. "I have to pack. I have to tell Orani and Siano. We have plenty of time. For now, I have to rest, and you have to prepare your house. Go, shoo, go." Amras kissed Silthri again, just as roughly; calling "till tomorrow, my wife!" he did finally go back across the roofs.

*

  
Silthri had thought that Orani would be pleased.

"Have you lost your wits?" asked Orani, waving her arms. "Marrying _Amras_?"

"Your house will be less crowded, and we can trade in horns and wool and hides from his sheep, which will make us all better off---"

"That's not what I mean! Have you forgotten what Zatori told us?"

"Well, people fight when they leave each other, and say things when they fight. Amras said that he hadn't hit Zatori, that she fell off the ladder, remember? He has a temper, I know, but no man is perfect."

Orani rolled her eyes. "Silthri, I, oh, Silthri. I think this is---" She bit down on her words, and shook her head, and sighed. "At least let Siano live with me. I can't see Amras taking well to a stepchild."

"I'm sure he'll be as kind as my stepmother was!" The thought of leaving her daughter put an edge in Silthri's voice. "She's my daughter, Orani, let me keep her! I know that children stay with their father's family, but she is a girl; I think she would do better with me."

Orani put her hands on her hips, "I thought Ziin would do better with me, but he has done well with his father's family."

"Then why didn't you marry Ranas then, and stay with Ziin? I could never let go of my child for my freedom." The moment the words left her mouth Silthri wished them back, but they were flown; pain and anger creased Orani's brow, and she opened her mouth, then closed it, shaking her head. "Because I love you, Silthri" she said in a low voice, "I hope you never have to live the truth of those words." She sat down on the sleeping platform, facing away, her hair hiding her face.

"Orani, I, I'm sorry. I take that back. I should never have said that." Silthri pushed herself up from the floor to cross the room and lay her hand on Orani's shoulder. "I love you, too. You're my sister. What would I do in this City without you?"

Orani put her hand on Silthri's, but she still looked down. "I'm just worried for you."

"I know. Thank you for worrying for me. Thank you for caring for me." Silthri wrapped her arms around Orani, laying her cheek on her hair. "I think, I think Amras will do. I think he will be a good husband."

"I hope so, Silthri, I hope so." Orani shifted to embrace Silthri. "I very much hope so. If he isn't, though, your home is still here. You are my sister." Silthri nodded into Orani's hair, putting her thanks into her embrace, and they sat together.

  
*

Silthri remembered that conversation as she labored to bring forth her third child. It was the small dark hours of the morning, and she lay with her head in Orani's lap; Orani dozed, one ear left awake for anything Silthri might need, and Silthri dozed between contractions, at least until she heard a masculine mutter from the roof. "Isn't she done yet?" Amras grumpily asked his sister Zeora, and Silthri's surge of anger on hearing that woke her up fully.

Zeora's response, which heartened Silthri considerably, was to slap him. "You idiot, do you think she's an ewe? It takes time to birth a child, and work; she is working harder than you ever will."

"You women, you carry on as if birth is so hard. If we men gave birth it would be over in moments."

"If men gave birth there would be no human people." Zeora said something else to chide her brother, but Silthri lost it as her womb clenched again, and she gasped and pushed. What was important was the baby. Come, baby, come, she thought. Come to me. Be healthy and beautiful, like your father.

  
*

  
Dessi was indeed healthy and beautiful, and every day she looked more like Dexias and Orani. "Who bore that child," teased Zaton, "you or Orani?" He extracted a painting-stick from Dessi's chubby fingers and kissed the toddler's forehead before sending her back to her play.

"Don't say that before Orani," warned Silthri, holding the clay paint-pots for him as he painted a mural of increase to Amras' sheep and household. "She may laugh off being barren, but it hurts her deeply. She wept till I thought she would be ill, when Anin died. I'm glad she doesn't hate me for having children."

Zaton nodded with a smile, then turned back to concentrate on the details he was painting. "How does Amras feel about this pregnancy?"

Silthri tried to speak happily. "He says that 'finally he will have a child of his own'. I think---"

"He said _what_?!" Zaton turned from painting to stare at Silthri. "He said that to you? What a crawling thing!"

"Oh! So I wasn't, I thought I was ungrateful to dislike those words!" Silthri pressed her hand to her mouth, and Zaton laid his painting sticks down and wrapped his arms around her. "You were not at all ungrateful. He is ungrateful, to not appreciate his two beautiful stepdaughters. Siano is nearly old enough to start helping him and his brothers with the sheep!"

"That's where she is now, learning." Silthri leaned into Zaton's embrace. "I hope they are getting on better today. She came back crying yesterday." Silthri felt like crying herself. "I thought, I thought we---"

The trap door swung open, and Silthri and Zaton let go of each other. Amras came down into the room, looking angry. "I'm hungry! What are you doing lazing about?"

"Good day to you too, my husband," snapped Silthri; Amras' eye fell on Zaton and he flew into a rage. "What are you doing with my wife, Zaton!"

"Painting your wall and talking to my friend," replied Zaton even-temperedly, as he started packing up his supplies. "Silthri had her life before she married you," he added. Amras rushed towards him, but Zaton dodged adroitly around him and climbed out of the house before he could be thrown out. Amras turned to Silthri, still shouting. "I don't like your being alone with him!"

"He was _painting_ , Amras. Don't act like a child." Silthri was starting to shake, but neither tears nor screaming would avail with Amras' temper, so she strove to stay calm, to call up her stepmother's voice. "You're going to upset Dessi if you keep shouting. And the child within me." Speaking of children..."Where is Siano?"

"Bathing at the River. She fell in some mud."

"And you left her there, alone?" Silthri swiftly gathered up Dessi and started up the ladder; her heavy body protested, as did her arms, but she forced herself to climb as if she weren't carrying two children.

"Get back here!" called Amras. "I'm hungry!"

"There's pottage in the oven," snapped Silthri, just before she dropped the trap door and set off to find her child.

*

  
Siano was, fortunately, in the company of Zeora and her children; Silthri let Dessi join them in splashing at the riverbank and sat heavily down beside Zeora. "I wish Amras had told me he'd left her with you."

Zeora's plump face was washed with surprise. "She was supposed to be with Amras? She was alone when my daughters found her. I'm glad to watch her, but...." Zeora looked at Silthri, her question in her eyes, and Silthri shook her head, unwilling to accuse her husband to his sister.

Zeora accused him for her. "Amras has always had a temper, all my brothers have, but his is getting worse as he gets older, not better." Zeora put her arm around Silthri's shoulder. "He may be my brother, but that doesn't mean I have to pretend he does no wrong. He's not being a good husband to you."

"I can't leave him, though." Silthri leaned on Zeora, her eyes prickling. "I'm carrying his child. I can't leave him. If I left the baby with him, who would care for it and suckle it? A man can't give milk."

"Oh, I have plenty of milk." Zeora did, too. She was always pregnant and seemed to thrive on it. "I'm his sister, I could take the baby for you to satisfy him. It's just one more child."

'But', Silthri nearly said, the idea of giving up her child tasting bad in her mouth; suddenly, she remembered what she had said to Orani, back when Orani had tried to warn her off of Amras, and she laughed sadly. She deserved this pain for saying those words. "Zeora, you are such a friend to me. Thank you. I'll bring you food and cloth."

"Oh, I love babies. It's no more work for me." Zeora kissed Silthri's brow, and they sat watching their children play on the riverbank.

*

Silthri wearily brought Amras a large bowl of acorn porridge, gave Siano a smaller bowl and directed her to feed Dessi as well, then sat down on the other platform to nurse Amnat. He was a fussy baby who didn't nurse easily and wouldn't sleep much at night; Silthri sometimes wondered if all the strife between her and Amras had poisoned him in her womb.

 _Crack!_ Something hard struck Silthri in the head and bounced off to land on her foot; screaming with pain and surprise, she clutched Amnat with one hand, clutched her head with the other. Amras was standing, shouting something, but she couldn't even hear him through the waves of pain going through her head.

"Stop it!" screamed Siano. Silthri opened her eyes to see a baked-clay ball at her feet, half-covered in acorn porridge. She had used some of her clay balls as pot-boilers to make the porridge, and must have left one in Amras' bowl. She wiggled her fingers and found a splotch of acorn porridge in her hair.

Amras was stomping across the room. Siano, followed by Dessi, jumped up and ran to stand in front of their mother. "Leave Mama alone!" screamed Siano at him, and Dessi added "Lea' 'lone!" in her piping baby voice. It almost could have been funny.

Amras glared at the children, raising his arm, and Silthri forced herself to her feet despite the pain still pounding through her head. "Amras! What is wrong with you?" She tried to sweep the two little girls behind her, but they refused to budge.

"With me?" Amras roared, his face going red. "You're the lazy bitch who left clay balls in my breakfast!" At least he wasn't about to hit her children anymore. Silthri stared up at her transformed husband, fear knotting in her stomach, and tried to summon up all the obduracy of her long days alone in R'chue, defending herself against suitors. "I am sorry for the clay ball," she said, trying to keep her voice even, "but throwing it at me was ridiculous. You could have hit Amnat."

"Whose fault would that have been?" Silthri bit down her reply to that; Amras was obviously not calming, so she had to get her children out of there. "Up to the roof, girls, Sister Sun is risen," she said, trying to make herself sound cheerful, which only made her voice shake all the more. Dessi started climbing up the ladder at that, but Siano was older and more aware, and shook her head until Silthri sternly said, "Go!". As Amras fumed behind her, pacing and muttering about how she had ruined his morning meal, Silthri handed Amnat and the bowl of porridge up to Siano. He was rather too young for acorn porridge, she thought ruefully, but we do what we must.

"Amras, why are you acting like this?" Silthri asked him as reasonably as she could, trying to act like a grown woman no matter how he did. "What happened to the kind young man who courted me?"

"What happened to me! What happened to you? I haven't changed! You're the one who acted the sweet good wife till you had seduced and entrapped me!"

A woman can only take so much. Silthri put her hands on her hips and screamed back her incredulous rage. "Seduced you? Entrapped you? Well you can be free at any moment! I can take my children and go!" That wasn't entirely how she had planned to tell him, but the words were on their way.

"Go? Go where?" Amras laughed nastily. "You have no family here!"

"I have Orani!"

"The sister of your dead husband?"

"The sister of my heart!" Silthri heard herself screaming and forced herself to lower her voice. The children were sitting on the roof. "This marriage is not working, Amras. I am going to leave you."

"And leave Amnat here, motherless?" Amras grinned as his words hit, punching a hole through Silthri's defiance. She sat heavily down "He's your son, he can stay with Zeora."

"Oh, no he will not. My rabbit of a sister already doesn't know how many children she has. My son is not staying with her. He's staying here, and so will you, if you want him to thrive, if you want me to have any reason to treat your bratty little daughters well."

Silthri had no answer to that, and began to cry. As if satisfied with her submission, Amras knelt before her, his voice as kind as when he'd been courting her. "I don't want to shout at you, Silthri," he said, wrapping his arms around her. "I just need a wife I can depend upon." Silthri nodded, still crying, hoping that he would just leave. He kissed her forehead, then on her mouth till she responded just to satisfy him; she was beginning to be afraid that he'd want to lie with her, but he let her go and climbed off to care for his sheep, and Silthri lay down in the bed-furs and wept.

  
*

  
"I hate scraping hides," said Silthri, hearing the petulance in her voice, and smiling apologetically even as she said it. Orani laughed and patted her arm. "I know, but you do well with them."

"And you do well at trading them." Silthri sighed, the news she had weighing her heart down. "Amras says, though...."

"Oh, what does that idiot say?" said Orani lightly; then she looked at Silthri's face and sat down beside her, putting her arm around her shoulder. "What did he say, Silthri?"

"He's not giving me any more to give you to trade for us. He says that you're cheating us, and that you need to trade with him for them like anyone else." Silthri hung her head, ashamed of her husband's words. "He also said that I spend too much time here."

Orani opened her mouth, but was so angry she was speechless; Silthri had not seen her so angry since the day Dexias had died. She got up and paced, her hands on her hips. "He thinks he owns you!" Orani finally sputtered.

"Yes, but he doesn't." Now Silthri could lift her head. "Amnat is the only one of us Amras cares for, so as soon as Amnat is weaned I'm leaving him. Zeora has promised me to watch over him when I cannot." Silthri smiled, but Orani shook her head. "What if you catch another child?"

"I only lie with him the week of my moon-days. I told him that I'm weary from having babies and I need a rest." Silthri didn't add that this logic did not always work on Amras; Orani was angry enough as is.

"That's true, anyway." Orani sat beside Silthri again, who reached out and took her hands. "You were right, Orani. You were right about all of it."

"I did not want to be right." Orani wrapped her arms around Silthri. "I so did not want to be right. Bring the girls to stay with me?"

"I was just going to ask that. Thank you, Orani." Silthri shook her head. "I owe Zatori an apology. I should have believed her."

"Don't you see her by the River sometimes?"

"Yes, but... the first time I saw her after the wedding, I thought she might act the way Eligo does, so I didn't talk to her, and now the silence has grown."

Orani squeezed Silthri encouragingly. "You're not so stubborn that you can't talk to her now."

Silthri nodded, and sighed. "I don't understand why Amras changed. He was my friend before we married."

Orani shrugged at that. "Some men just think they need to control their wives. I wish his mothers were alive to talk some sense into him." Silthri thought of them, wise and wiry Irano, fat and warm Amthri, and felt a pang. "I do, too."

*

  
"Where are the girls?" Amras stood in the middle of the house, hands on hips, wearing the scowl he wore more and more often. Silthri, in the kitchen, sighed and wondered again why she hadn't listened to Orani. "They're staying with Orani and Ranas for a bit," she said as evenly as she could manage, preparing herself for his reaction as he realized what their absence meant.

She was not prepared at all for what he did; growling, "you are not leaving me!" he reached through the doorway and dragged her into the living room by her braided hair. Silthri shrieked and clutched his wrist, trying to prevent her hair from being torn out, which startled baby Amnat into crying.

Amras threw her onto the floor beside the hearth. "Who told you that you could leave them in that house?" Silthri was still gasping, shaken by her fall and shocked that he would raise his hand to her; he stood over her and shouted at her again. "I never gave you permission to leave them there!"

"They are not your children!" Silthri shouted back. "You're acting like the man who killed Dexias did! Stop trying to bully me!"

"Bully you? I just want you to behave! You could use some discipline!" Amras grasped Silthri's wrist and hauled her across the room. "Out every day, gadding about, probably lying with every man who goes by!" Amnat kept screaming, and Silthri struggled to go to him, but Amras wouldn't let her go; he pulled her across his waist as he sat down on the platform, holding her down with an arm across her back. "Let me go! Let me go to the baby!" Silthri cried, more afraid of Amras than she had ever been.

"Why won't you behave?" Amras asked, stroking her back and rump in a manner that was not at all soothing. "I gave you a house, I keep you well, and you eat milk and yogurt every day. Why can't you be a good wife to me, Silthri?" Before she could come up with a retort for that ridiculous question, he struck her.

The beating he gave her was a parody of the sort of spanking one might give a naughty child, though Silthri would never spank a child that way, and Amras certainly hit her harder and for longer than one ever would a child. All the while, Amnat screamed in his basket, and Silthri wept and struggled, begging Amras to let her go to their son, trying to ignore the pain and the humiliation.

Finally, he let her go, and Silthri dragged herself to her purple-faced baby, trying to soothe him. Curled up on her side, her rump sore and throbbing, she looked up at Amras. The man who had been her friend seemed entirely gone; Silthri wondered if a demon had possessed him, and if so, which the demon was.

Amras came across the room to pick her up, and she flinched, but he merely lifted her to set her on the platform. "Will you behave, then?" he asked her, his eyes and voice mild. "Tomorrow I will go bring the girls home, and we will all be fine. I heard today that the Elders are founding a village for herdsmen, where our flock will have space and pasturage to increase; I told Olthas that we would go. That's why I needed to know where the girls are, you see. We'll do well there, Silthri. We'll finally be happy." Silthri closed her eyes, unable to comprehend what was happening to her life, and kept rocking Amnat; taking her withdrawal for submissive acceptance, Amras let her be and went to sit on the other platform. By the time Amnat was finally calmed enough to stop crying he was too weak to suck; Silthri held her baby, now pale and listless as she felt, and they both drifted off into an unquiet sleep.

*

That night, Silthri had a dream. A woman, a slender young woman with long white hair and butterfly wings hovered above her. _"Remember me,"_ the maiden told Silthri in a voice like copper chimes and the wind through the grass. _"Remember me and restore my House, and find your future"_. Her long hair brushed Silthri's face as she shone brighter, and brighter, and brighter still---

\---till Silthri realized that it was full daylight; she had overslept. Amnat lay peacefully beside her. She opened her eyes, found Amras already gone, and breathed a sigh of relief.

When she stretched she found herself sore, but able to move. She threw her felted wool dress over her head, brushed back stray wisps of hair with her hands, and, gathering up her sleeping son in one arm, climbed out of the house. She had much to do with the day, and none of it involved preparing to leave Lillun for some herding village. Silthri pushed open the trap door---

\---and was met by Naffan, Amras' eleven-year-old brother, holding an obsidian knife and looking very unsure of himself. "Sister Silthri. Good morning. Um. Amras told me you were to stay here till he came home."

"He did, did he?" Silthri could almost have laughed. Amras had set this boy to keep her in? "And what are you going to do if I don't?"

"Um, you have to." Naffan tried to set his jaw firmly, and Silthri did not know whether slapping him or laughing at him would hurt him more. Instead, carefully keeping the baby on the side away from his knife, she pushed past Naffan onto the roof.

"Sister Silthri, stop!" Naffan chased after her and grasped her wrist, and she looked at him coolly. "Who gave you the right to lay a hand on me?"

"Uh, Am-Amras?"

"He doesn't own me." Silthri started pulling away, but Naffan stubbornly held on, and she was just opening her mouth to scold the boy when Zeora appeared behind him. "Naffan!" she cried, and he spun, losing his grip on Silthri in the process.

"Naffan!" Zeora stormed up to the boy and slapped him hard on his cheek. "How _dare_ you treat any woman this way! _Especially_ your sister-by-marriage!"

"Buh, buh...." Tears were already beginning to run down Naffan's cheeks. "Amras told me to---"

"To watch his wife as if she were livestock? By the Mother's hair, my brothers spend too much time with the sheep." Zeora raised her hand again threateningly, and Silthri pressed hers to her mouth, trying to not giggle. "Get out of here, boy, before I tell Olas-the-lesser all about your stupidity and have him beat you as you deserve!" Naffan ran, and Silthri let out her giggle, embracing Zeora and kissing her cheek with gratitude. "Thank you for saving me from your brother!" Silthri managed to say as they both laughed.

Then Zeora sobered. "That is, actually, why I came. Tatha told me what is happening, what Naffan was sent to do. I came to tell Amras he was being cruel."

"I don't know if he would listen anymore, even to you." Silthri embraced Zeora again. "Thank you for, well...."

"Kin are kin, but friends are friends," said Zeora, smiling; her newest baby looked up over her shoulder and smiled at Silthri as well. "And, Silthri my friend, we have some work to do."

  
*

  
At sunset, Silthri stood on the roof of the home she had lived in for the last two years, waiting for the man who would soon no longer be her husband. She stood with her arms crossed, a fingernail-sized obsidian blade in her right hand, a stalk of barley in her left. Orani had told her that after he had tried to claim the girls he had stormed away, threatening to bring his brothers to help him; Zeora had sent her young sister Tatha to tell Silthri that Olas had faced Amras down and called him a fool. There was nowhere for him to go but his house, which he would find full of goods and empty of people. So Silthri narrowed her eyes, and smiled, and waited. The winter rains were beginning, so the wind blew around her, cold and moist with the occasional fat raindrop, but she stood there bare-armed, waiting.

She could hear Amras rummaging the house, ranting to himself; finally he came up out of the house muttering, "I am going to--- there you are! What are you doing outside? Where is that--- where is Naffan? Where is Amnat?" He asked in a pleasant enough voice, but his eyes glinted.

"I am leaving you," said Silthri calmly. Amras stared at her as if she spoke another language; he finished climbing out of the house and took a step towards her, and she took a step back. "I am leaving you, Amras." She tossed the stalk of barley before his feet. "Food, for the food you gave me."

"You can't leave me!" it may have been meant to be a bellow, but it emerged from Amras' throat a wailing cry.

Silthri pricked her finger with the blade, then threw it beside the barley. "A blade, for the goods you gave me." She squeezed her finger, and a drop of blood fell to the roof. "Blood, for the seed you gave me."

"Who will go with me to the new village?" Amras lunged forward and yelped; he had stepped on the little blade. As he sat heavily, holding his injured foot, Silthri thought of all the things she wanted to say, and firmly told herself to say none of them. "I do not know, and I do not care. I and my children will not."

"You have to give me Amnat!" Amras howled at her as she turned on her heel. "He is my son! You must or I will curse you! Silthri! Silthri!"

Her head high, her future before her and Amras screaming behind her, Silthri steadily walked away.  



	6. Dawn City, Chapter Six

**Chapter Six.**

Four days later, Silthri returned to Amras' house, far less triumphant than when she had left. In her arms she carried a basket, in which rested the stiff little body of Amnat. He must already have been falling ill when she had left his father, and now he was dead. Her breasts leaked, as if weeping for their lost suckler.

Orani walked behind her, with Ranas and Ziin and Siano. Dessi was staying with Zeora, delightedly running about with Zeora's two toddlers; when Silthri had left her there she had hardly looked back. Siano, however, would not let herself be left, so, although Silthri thought she would have been safer away from Amras, she walked with them, holding onto Ziin's hand. Silthri hoped she could manage to not fail her eldest child, as she had failed her youngest. _My poor little baby_ , she thought, another tear running down her cheek. _My poor little baby, poisoned by your parents' strife. Perhaps your father did curse me, and it hit you, like a thrown clay pot-boiler. My poor little baby._

Her eyes threatened to overflow again, but Silthri was not going to cry before Amras. Not ever again. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and lifted the trapdoor. "Amras?" she called in her stepmother's voice.

"He's not here," called a familiar voice, and Tenao stepped to the base of the ladder. "Silthri? I thought you had gone! Come in, come in!"

Silthri climbed down, followed by her family, and embraced Tenao; Orani squeezed her hand, rather more stiffly, while Ranas sat with the children and took some knucklebones from a belt-pouch. Tenao looked older, but better, as if the demon of her sister's husband had finally ceased haunting her. She looked at Silthri's burden and blanched. "Oh, Silthri. Is this your baby?"

Silthri nodded. "I have brought him back to bury him where he was born. I had thought I would find his father here."

"Amras? He traded me this house. I gave mine to my niece and her new husband and his young sisters, it was... too much for me to live there anymore." Silthri nodded. "Amras had said that he was going to the new village with his wife, which was why he needed cloth and supplies. I thought he meant you."

Silthri shrugged at that. "I don't know. He didn't mean me, that I know. We are no longer married." That thought reminded her, and she looked down at Amnat's pale still face. "I don't know where to bury Amnat, then, though. This house is yours now, and I certainly wish you good living in it, but..."

"Of course you may bury your baby here." Tenao led Silthri to a sheltered corner of the large room, between the bed-platforms. "This is where his basket sat, isn't it?"

"It is. Thank you, Tenao." Silthri blinked hard, and tears ran down her cheeks, but her voice stayed steady. Tenao smiled and put her arm around Silthri's shoulders. "It is no problem at all."

Ranas dug a small hole, and they laid the small baby in it and sang to his soul, covered him and smoothed the floor with wet hands. Silthri pressed in a handprint above the grave, then glanced at Tenao. "Is that all right?"

"It's fine. I think I'll keep it during Replastering." Tenao embraced Silthri again. "I am sorry your baby died."

"Thank you. He just, between me and his father our hatred made him sick..." The tears surged up, and Silthri pressed her hands to her face and wept. Tenao and Orani wrapped their arms around her, and Siano jumped up from the knucklebone game to embrace Silthri's leg, as she wept, for her dead child, for her broken marriage.

Like a summer storm, it was over soon. Silthri wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and Tenao stood back and smiled reassuringly, while Orani squeezed her warmingly before letting go and picking up Siano. Silthri kissed Siano, squeezing Orani's hand, and turned to smile at Tenao. "Thank you. I, well...."

"I hope life eases for you." Tenao squeezed Silthri's hand, then went to the kitchen and returned with a handful of dried figs, one for each of them. "Please take these, and my blessing. May you prosper, Silthri. May your belly and your arms be full again."

Tenao's kindness threatened to undo her again. "Thank you," she whispered, and Orani, actually smiling now, thanked Tenao in a louder voice and encouraged the children to thank her. Tenao embraced them again, and they climbed out of the house, leaving Amnat to sleep in his accustomed spot, leaving the house to Tenao who could make a new start in it.

*

"You were talkative," said Orani, squeezing Silthri's hand, cheering her immensely. "Well, you were silent, someone had to talk." More pensively, Silthri added, "Tenao was very kind to us. I think she will be kind to my sleeping baby."

"I think she will, too. Still..."Orani looked out across the City, glowing golden in the sunset. "Seeing her reminds me of that day..."

"I know." Silthri put her arm around Orani. "Me as well. But, seeing us must remind her of that day. She suffered much that day as well." Raising her voice, Silthri called to Ranas, "It's near here, to the south."

"Are you certain about this?" asked Orani yet once more. "No one has lived in that place since that ancient, ancient lady died the year Siano was born. You can move back in with us, you know."

"I know," said Silthri, squeezing Orani appreciatively. "I know, and I am grateful that I always have a home with you. That's why I need to do this. I have always been sheltered by others. It's time I made a home of my own."

They arrived. Silthri had come to the dilapidated Butterfly Shrine four days before with a ladder, which looked incongruously fresh and new in its dusty surroundings. The trap door had fallen in when Silthri lifted it to put in the ladder, and everywhere were spider webs and bits of plaster from the walls.

"This place feels haunted," said Ranas, holding Ziin close. "Are you sure dangerous souls don't live here?"

"What you feel is the Butterfly Maiden's power," said Silthri, stretching her arms to the dilapidated murals of the Butterfly Lady. "She's all but forgotten, so she feels unhappy, but I remember her."

Orani tilted her head, looking at Silthri dubiously. "How, Silthri? You're not a priestess."

"I dreamt her." Silthri reminded them. "She doesn't need a priestess. She's as little as a butterfly. She just needs to be remembered, and she gave me this house so that I would."

Orani shook her head and kissed Silthri on her cheek. "You feel well, you smell well, no demon shines out of your eyes. You must simply hear singing the rest of us do not."

Silthri smiled, and went to her chest in the corner, covered with a hide to keep it dry. "That's what Zeora said. She also said I had lost my wits." She pulled out a woolen cloak and wrapped it around Siano, who was rubbing her eyes and shivering. "Siano, you can stay with Aunt Orani if you want," Silthri offered, yet again.

Just as she had given Orani the same reply, so did her daughter give her the same reply. Silthri smiled as Siano stubbornly shook her curly head. "No, Mama, I will stay with you. I don't want you to be alone."

"Well, then." Silthri picked up her daughter, who laid her head on her mother's shoulder and began to suck her thumb. "I won't be alone. I have my daughter and the Butterfly Maiden."

"You have lost your wits," said Orani fondly, and she and Ranas and Ziin all embraced Silthri and left. Silthri pulled the wool cloak around herself and lay down on the sleeping platform which was still solid; holding Siano, feeling more at peace than she had felt since before Dexias died, Silthri fell asleep.

*

The next morning was not quite so peaceful. A spray of cold water in the face woke Silthri, and she looked up to find rain blowing through the hole where the trap door should have been. Siano woke up, too, and shouted, "I'm wet! I'm cold! I hate this!" and started to cry.

Silthri took a deep breath, feeling her over-full breasts ache, feeling her heart ache as well. "I am too, my honeycomb. We have a lot of work to do on this house."

"Why do we have to?" Weeping, Siano huddled miserably in the shelter of Silthri's body; Silthri wrapped her arms around her daughter, stroking her face. "Because the Butterfly Maiden gave me this house to live in, so I could leave Amras."

"Couldn't she have given you a house that wasn't broken?" Silthri laughed, there being nothing else for it, and rocked her daughter. "This is what she gave us, and we will fix it, you and I. Now, let us get up and go to Aunt Orani's house for some breakfast."

One of the benefits of having been a herdsman's wife, and having scraped all those horrible hides, was that at least Silthri had hide cloaks and dresses for herself and both her daughters, clothing that would keep out the rain. She wrapped Siano up and kissed the little girl till she would smile again, led her across to Orani's house, saw her fed and warmed, and rocked her to sleep. Only then, with a kiss and instructions left with Orani, did she leave for her errand that day.

Silthri went to the house of Thas the Builder. Thas was a wealthy man, because there were so many houses in Lillun, and because he had had three wives, all fertile women who tended to boys. However, his house was quite full, and Silthri knew that some of Thas' sons wanted work, and eventually homes, of their own.

One of those sons was Silthri's friend Enas, who eagerly left a game of knucklebones to speak with her on the roof. "I just moved to the Butterfly House," she told him, and he laughed. "That old place? I'm surprised it hasn't finished falling down yet. Take care that it doesn't fall upon you."

"That's why I need your help, Enas," said Silthri. "I need for you to look at it, and tell me if the walls are sound, and, first of all, make me another trap-door." Enas looked interested, at the idea of a project of his own, so she went on. "I don't have much, but I do have quite a few fine hides, and I can cook for you while you help me."

Enas considered this, then shook his head. "Good, but not enough. We have a fair number of hides right now. I can think of what else you can give me, though," he went on, a gleam growing in his nut-brown eye, as he put his hand gently under Silthri's chin. "A little of your time."

Silthri looked up at him, conflict swirling in her stomach. She liked him, and he was right about what little she had, but... "I married a friend already, and it broke our friendship. Besides, Ilta----"

"Our friendship has broken also," said Enas, a little sadly. "She's going to marry someone else. I don't care to marry right now, Silthri, and I doubt you do either. I could use a break from this crowded house, though. And you are far too pretty a woman to lie alone."

Silthri smiled. "You flatter me. I'm an old mother who needs help repairing her house. But, at least, I have plenty of time."

*

  
Siano was pleasantly amenable to staying with Orani for a few days, not least because of the honey Orani had given her. She tried to do a somersault, fell over, and laughed, and Silthri laughed too, glad to see her daughter more light-hearted.

Then Siano sat up, serious again. "You are sure you won't be alone, Mama?"

"Yes, I won't be alone. My friend Enas will be staying with me. He is going to fix the trap door so no more rain gets in, and make sure the house is sturdy."

"Are you going to lie with him?" That question made Silthri's face burn, but she remembered being a child, and the futility of lying to children. "Yes, I am going to. Do you think I should not?"

"I was going to tell you to," said Siano, as if telling her mother she should eat. "Lying together is good for grown people. Auntie Orani said so." With that, the child returned to her somersaults; Silthri looked up to find Orani laughing silently. She made a rude face back, as if they were children, and went on her way with a much lighter heart.

  
*

  
Silthri worked hard the next week. Not so much in bed; lying with Enas had a pleasant, bouncy rhythm all its own, and as she lay beside him afterwards Silthri reflected, not without pleasure, on how interestingly different each man is. During the daytime, though, she had much to do. The first day she swept the house with a bundle of the straightest rushes and scrubbed it with wads of the bent ones, while Enas thoroughly went over the roof and even flattened himself into the space beside the house's west side to examine the walls. "I can't believe it," he told Silthri. "One would never think that this house had lain empty for six years." The walls sounded solid to his knock, and the roof needed only a few repairs; regular spring replastering, with perhaps a few extra replaced bricks, would make it snug, and until then it was quite fit to live in.

The rains slackened on the next day, letting Enas work on the roof and Silthri go out gathering. For most City people, the rainy winter season was a time to rest, but Silthri went to work, gathering the acorns and nuts that were still in the groves and especially up on the mountain flanks. She had taken the tubers off the rushes before she scrubbed with them, and smashed tubers, sweet acorns, nuts, and peas made a tasty, warming pottage that Enas literally licked off the bowl. "I didn't know you could cook this well!" he exclaimed, and she blushed like a girl and kissed him.

Truth be told, even with the hard work Silthri felt happier than she had since Dexias had died. She felt as if she were purging herself of Amras' touch, sweating out the poison and pain of the last two years. When she went walking alone in the quiet, rainy fields and groves, hearing no voices but those of birds and animals, it seemed to her that the spirits of the plains and trees and world outside the City liked their winter visitor; she gave them appreciation of their winter bounty, and in return she felt herself slowly being healed, surely healing.

One night she dreamt of Dexias, whole and well and handsome, that he took her hands and stroked her cheek and kissed her till the pleasure went through her heart like a spear. She woke to Enas' baritone snores, and rolled over to touch his face, though she couldn't see him in the rainy darkness. Enas was pleasant company, warm and firm, and a hard worker, but Dexias, coming to her in a dream, had reminded her of what love felt like. Perhaps that was what he had come to tell her, to try to guide her from making another mistake? Silthri thought, listening to the rain and Enas' contented snoring. Before she could love another man, she thought, she needed to know she could care for herself. She needed to make the Butterfly House a home. She closed her eyes again, thinking of the House as it would look when it was done, and smiled, and fell back to sleep.

*

"There." Enas climbed back down into the house, where Silthri was sorting nuts, throwing the bad ones into the hearth. "I have done everything the rains will allow, and I will sneak away in early spring and bring you some bricks for your walls."

Silthri stood up, dusting off her skirt and picking up the large hide cape she had sewn, and embraced him. "Thank you for working on the house for me. I insist that you at least take this, since I made for you."

"Oh, all right. If I must." Enas smiled at Silthri and kissed her. "Thank you for these days away from my family. I hate to go back to that packed beehive and Nitha's burned pottages."

Silthri laughed and pushed him away gently. "I have to go get my daughters, and you have to go home. I will come by and play knucklebones sometime. I will see you in the spring."

"See you in the spring," said Enas cheerfully, squeezing her hand as he climbed up.

Silthri watched him go with mixed feelings. He had been pleasant company, but.... _but I have a trapdoor that keeps out the rain, and solid walls and roof_ , she reminded herself. _And I have daughters to bring home_. She put on her cape and, picking up a half-full pail of walnuts, she set out.

Orani was delighted by the walnuts. "Where did you find these?" she exclaimed, tossing nuts to Ranas and Ziin, who immediately cracked and enjoyed them.

"I went walking," said Silthri, smiling. Siano kissed her mother before claiming two walnuts and cracking them with a baked clay ball, and Orani looked at Silthri, her smile growing till it reached her ears. "You look well," she said with a deeper delight, and kissed Silthri on her cheek. "You look very well. Enas was good for you?"

"Yes, but...nothing taken from him, but not just him. Living has been good for me."

  
*

For the next month, Silthri took Siano out gathering with her, and sometimes also Dessi, when she wasn't going too far for Dessi's little legs to walk. Since coming to Lillun she had almost forgotten what her village childhood had taught her about the bounty of the winter world; because everyone in Lillun mostly stayed in during the winter, so she had too, even though there was much to find and gather. Not this winter, however. One day she and her daughters even found a stand of late-ripening grain, and spent the next two days toasting it in batches on a flat rock on the hearth; even after the bits that were hopelessly soaked or burnt were lost, they still had an entire pailful.

Siano seemed to warm to the house, now that it kept the rain out; when the snows finally arrived and they had to stay in she happily helped her mother sew and sort, swept the house, played with Dessi, or drew with ash-covered fingers on the walls. She didn't even complain about how much acorn porridge they ate, for which Silthri could have blessed her except for fear that if she mentioned it Siano would notice and refuse to eat any more.

So, they lived well during the winter. Orani gave them some meat, but by and large Silthri lived by and fed her children with her own hands. Sometimes she would lie awake at night as her children slept, missing Dexias so that it felt like a knife through her, missing being married so that she shivered, even missing Amras, though she was never sure whether the kind man she missed was his true face or just a mask; sometimes she would turn her face into the woolen blanket and weep silently, but even that was part of healing, and afterwards she always slept sweetly.

One night she felt a small hand on her hand. "Mama?" whispered Siano. "Mama, are you weeping?"

Silthri wiped her face and helped her daughter climb in with her, wrapping her arms and the blanket around her. "I was, yes, but you have made me feel better."

"Why were you crying? Did a demon frighten you in a dream?"

"No, my darling. No, I was just missing your father. Do you remember him?"

"Papa? A little. His hair was round, like mine, and he smiled and tossed me in the air." Siano sounded sleepy already, and Silthri stroked her curls away from her face and smiled. "I am here with you, Mama."

"Yes, Siano, you are. And I am glad." No answer came but sleeping breathing, but Silthri echoed the words in her heart. Indeed, she was glad.

  
*

  
Springtime came, warm and sunny. Enas returned with a basket full of bricks and fixed the walls, after which Silthri and Siano plastered the house, while Dessi played in the plaster. Zaton came to stay for a few days, even though it was the busiest muralling season, and painted their walls with hands and a lovely winged maiden, just as Silthri had dreamt her, for nothing more than friendship and a few nights' staying over.

One day while Zaton was painting, Siano wandered up behind him and asked, "So, are you going to marry my Mama?"

Siano was entirely too good at that sort of question, Silthri reflected, as Zaton froze for a moment, then kept painting. "No, Sii-Sii. Why do you ask?"

"Well, she hasn't been married all winter, and you are much nicer than Papa Amras was." Zaton looked over his shoulder at Silthri, who impishly made a face at him. _Siano asked you, so_ you _answer her_ , she thought cheerfully.

Zaton rolled his eyes at Silthri, and she had to stifle a giggle; then he sat down on the platform to talk to Siano. "I am.... not a man who marries, Siano, any more than a bee can marry all the flowers." Silthri had to bite her knuckles not to laugh at that image. "Besides, your Mama is not yet ready to marry again. Leaving a marriage leaves a wound inside a person" he pointed to the big scratch on Siano's knee as he said this, "and that has to heal, like any other wound."

Siano nodded. "Then why are you lying with her?" Silthri's ears perked, not least since it was a question she had wanted to ask herself, but while Zaton began to turn red, Siano answered her own question. "It's good for her, I remember. It's good for adults, just as it is bad for little ones like me."

Deciding to finally rescue Zaton, Silthri got up, rescuing a basket from Dessi as she did so. "Do you want another Papa, Siano?"

Siano cocked her head as she thought, looking so much like her father that the sight sent a bittersweet pain through Silthri's heart. "I don't know, Mama," she finally said. "Not if he will be mean like Papa Amras." That hurt, not even bittersweetly. "If we can have one like my first Papa, but without the broken head, that would be nice."

Zaton looked at Silthri, who looked up at him with what she knew were wide, wet eyes. "That would be nice," she agreed with Siano, trying to think of what else they could talk about before she began to weep. "Can you show Zaton how you can do a somersault?"

"Yes!" Siano jumped up and tumbled into Dessi, and both little girls laughed.

That night, after the girls had gone to sleep, Zaton poked Silthri. "You are a cruel woman, letting your daughter pin me down like that!"

Silthri giggled uncontrollably, her hand to her mouth. "Oh, that was just too delicious to watch!"

"Do you intend to answer every last question that child asks?"

Silthri nodded. "Why not? My stepmother used to answer mine. If she asks then she wants to know." Zaton smiled at that, putting his arm around Silthri and squeezing her shoulders, and she leaned into his embrace.

  
*

  
Feeling like a flower blooming, putting on all her jewelry and swinging her hips, Silthri went gathering in the springtime, and as she walked through the City the young men hooted and cheered at her once again. Orani walked with her sometimes, and one day she said, "I think you are growing younger, not older." Silthri thought about that and smiled. "I _feel_ younger." A boy whooped at her, and she waggled her hips, and Orani laughed approvingly.

In the springtime there was much to gather, not least eggs, as the River spread out around the City to form a marsh; Silthri, being small, and her daughters, being smaller, were good egg hunters, and she taught them to always leave one egg in each nest. Carrying a special wool-cushioned basket on her head, Silthri walked back through the City in the afternoons to trade for her eggs, and brought what she earned back to Orani, their organizer. Orani gave the goods that could be carried outside the City to Ranas and especially to Ziin, who was eagerly preparing to go on his first trading trip; his pack was threatening to grow larger than he was, as he tucked everything he could possibly think of into it. At nights, Ranas and Orani would pull particularly heavy items out for Ranas' pack, and particularly useless items out to put away or discard, but daily Ziin would fill his pack up again, speculating with excitement about the sorts of treasures he might bring back. Finally, Ranas and Ziin set off with the other men, and Silthri divided her and her daughters' time between the Butterfly House and keeping Orani company.

As the egg season trailed off and spring warmed into summer, Silthri walked further and further out onto the plain, picking flowers and grasses and herbs, tubers and early fruits. She also found a good quiet undisturbed spot to lay out flax to field-rett, which took much longer than retting in the shallows of the River but yielded a softly golden cloth. One day Silthri had left Siano to learn weaving from Orani and taken Dessi, who would merely have gotten tangled in thread, with her into the field. She stood in the midst of flowers, feeling the sunshine through her linen wrap and watching her daughter dance after butterflies, when she heard a man clear his throat. "Excuse me, lady?"

Silthri turned and saw a tall, broad, powerful-looking man, with a short divided beard and shaggy black hair, a lead armband polished to a soft sheen, a bow in his hand and a quiver of arrows on his back, and several animal tails dangling behind him, the trophies of a successful hunter. He was not young, perhaps thirty, and had a high brow and bushy eyebrows and keen gray eyes. Silthri recognized him as one of the City's hunters, but though she had traded with the hunters for meat and the occasional wild animal hide, she had never really talked to any of them. Not yet, at any rate.

"Big!" cried Dessi from behind Silthri, as she ran right up to the man. "Unca' Big!" She held out her plump baby hand, with a bright yellow-and-blue butterfly on it, and the three of them watched the butterfly float away.

Then the man looked at Silthri again, and smiled, a wide warm craggy smile. "Hullo, lady. Is this your daughter?" Silthri nodded, and reached to grab Dessi just as the child looked about to start climbing up the man's leg, "Le' go!" shouted Dessi at her mother. "I talk to Unca' Big!"

He laughed at that, and Silthri couldn't help but laugh as well. "She's very friendly," said Silthri, trying to hold her squirming daughter. "Sometimes reckless."

"She's a cute one." He held out his arms, and Silthri figured that must be his acceptance; she let Dessi run to him, and he swung the little girl up onto his shoulder so that she shrieked with delight. "My name is Oran," he said, holding out a large, long-fingered hand; Silthri watched his hand enclose her own as he squeezed it gently in greeting. "I saw you in the field with the butterflies, and I was going to ask if you were lost, but you seem to know what you are about."

"I am Silthri, and I go gathering far afield sometimes." Oran nodded. "I was just resting before turning back. Would you like to come with us?" Silthri had no idea why she said that, except perhaps that she liked his craggy smile, which he gave her again as he quietly took her pail out of her hand. Carrying both her daughter and her day's gatherings for her, he walked back with her to the City.

*

 

Oran was not the only man Silthri met that year, nor the only friend she made. She still spoke, and lay, with Enas and Zaton; occasionally, for an expensive item, she would trade 'a little of her time'. Feeling again as if she owned herself, no longer being married to a man who had fought to own her, was such a heady delight that there were days, with the sunshine coursing into and through her, that Silthri almost felt as if she could have said 'yes' to any man who asked her, and days when she could have said 'no' to any just for the pleasure of being able to refuse without a fight.

At the end of the Spring, under the full moon whose dark would be the Summerdance, Silthri danced the Moon. The first year she had danced it, she danced with Dexias, and it was like dancing their wedding again; the second year she had danced it, she danced with Zaton, laughing. During her marriage to Amras, she had not dared suggest it. This year, for reasons she could not have explained in words, she made her eyelids dark with kohl, wound her light, corner-beaded linen girdle around her face, and danced as a mystery, dancing all night with four different partners. She came home exhausted and slept half the next day, but woke feeling herself glowing, as if she had soaked up the Moon's light.

A few times she simply met someone, who told her the tales of his life and did homage to the Butterfly Maiden for a night: an obsidian miner, who lived half in the City and half on the slopes of the Double Mountain and who told her of the fire at the mountain's heart and gave her a chunk of raw obsidian larger than Siano's head; a trader from a distant hunting tribe, dazzled and a bit frightened by the City, reassured to find that a woman's arms felt the same there as ever; a weather-beaten but handsome man named Crannakhma who said, in a thicker accent than Silthri had ever heard, that he came from a city far to the east where he had quarreled with the headman and been exiled. Crannakhma did not end up lying with Silthri; when they met Zatori was staying with Silthri, their friendship long since having been mended, because her sister's husband had died, and when Zatori and Crannakhma saw each other they both looked like hungry children shown a honeycomb. Silthri woke in the night to hear them trying to be quiet, smiled, and closed her eyes, and was delighted a month later to be asked to witness their wedding.

After the wedding Silthri and Orani lay in bed, talking quietly while the children slept in a pile on the other platform; Silthri had lent Zatori her house until she and Cran, as they had all taken to calling him, had finished building one on the edge of the City. Ranas and Ziin were away trading, so Orani's house easily held Silthri and her daughters, who had giggled with Zeora's visiting daughter Amnao till they had all fallen asleep. "It is nice to lie in a woman's arms," sighed Silthri, pillowing her head on Orani's breasts. "I'm almost tired of men."

"I never get tired of men," said Orani cheerfully, and, more seriously, "I know the trading is good, Silthri; you're beautiful. But is this good for you?"

"You're the one who told my daughter that lying together is good for adults," Silthri teased in return. "She's been telling everyone that, Cran nearly died when she said it to him."

Orani laughed at that, her hand to her mouth. "True, I did. Cran probably needed to hear it, too. Even so, I do worry about you." Silthri opened her mouth, then remembered the last time she had disregarded Orani's advice and closed it again, and Orani went on. "You remind me of yourself when I first met you, and yet not; you are blooming again, but the flower is a harder one, somehow."

Silthri considered that, and nodded. "I can see that," she said slowly. "But the joy of owning myself... They look at me as I kneel above them, and the Butterfly Maiden stands behind me, her wings look like my own. They look up at me as if I were her, and she reaches through me to them, as if I feel as if I were her, between earth and sky, almost too beautiful to be seen; their homage and their delight feeds her, and she is not forgotten. If I bear a child of this, it will be my butterfly child, my moon child; together we could feed that baby too. Being able to give myself or not as I choose, seeing myself shine in their eyes, how can I give that up again so soon?"

Even as she said it, Silthri knew her year of living so was drawing to a close. All things have their time. "That sounds like a rapture, but all things have their time, Silthri," said Orani softly, echoing Silthri's thought. "You do so thrive in a family, and not all men would take your freedom in a marriage. Dexias didn't."

"Dexias loved me well," Silthri agreed. "Sometimes I can see him in my daughters' faces, sometimes in yours."

"Sometimes I can see him in yours," Orani said, and Silthri looked up at her in surprise. "He put so much of himself into you, sometimes I can see that shine out." Silthri squeezed Orani in response, and they lay silently for a moment, until Orani said, "how about that big hunter Oran?"

Silthri laughed quietly. "That would be more Abundance than a small woman like me could handle," she said, teasing Orani, for that was what her name and Oran's meant. "He thinks I am a pleasant girl, he likes having my daughters climb on him. He has never even asked me for a kiss."

"A man who likes having children climb on him may well like children of his own to climb on him," observed Orani, "and a man who does not ask for a bite may be saving up to trade for the whole loaf." She squeezed Silthri to emphasize her words, then rolled over to sleep.

 

*

 

Indeed, Oran proved to be the truest friend Silthri made that year, and more. One bright fall day, when Silthri had covered nearly her entire roof with most of her cloth and hides and laid grapes and figs and mushrooms across them all to dry, Siano climbed up to the roof just as Silthri was finished, looked around her, and looked distressed.

"Sii-Sii, what is it?" asked Silthri, but Siano shook her head, tottered to the edge of the roof, and threw up from its side into the space between houses. "Mama, I feel sick," she said in a weak, heartbreaking little voice, as Silthri danced urgently across all her drying fruits to pick up her daughter and take her down into the house again.

Siano and Dessi were both sick, and Silthri was alone to nurse them, for she did not dare leave them to get help and they were big enough now that she could not carry them both. Dessi fought the fever and battled it back fairly quickly, but Siano looked close to death, muttering and tossing, and Silthri wept over her daughter and sponged her brow.

"Hullo, Silthri?" Oran called from the roof, around midday the next day. Silthri ran over to call "come in!" and he did, carrying a fowl in one hand. "It stinks in here," she apologized. "My daughters fell ill, and I'm out of water..."

"I brought you some dinner," he said, indicating the fowl. Laying it down by the hearth, he vanished again, and Silthri, already feeling exhausted and horrid, thought he must have been horrified by her house and wept all the more, wishing he had at least stayed long enough so she could ask him to tell Orani what had happened.

Shortly, however, Oran returned, holding a large sheepskin bag full of water. He filled Silthri's water jar and buckets as she exclaimed; as she ran to fill a cup she kissed his shoulder gratefully. He still stood there, smiling oddly, as she ran past him again, but she hardly noticed as she gave Dessi water and then began dripping it on Siano's lips. When she looked up again Oran had plastered the bird with clay and was poking a hole in the embers in the hearth to bury it. "Oran, you have saved us!" Silthri cried with delight, and he smiled again, more widely, turning a slow red beneath his deep tan.

Oran stayed with her all through that long night, as Dessi improved and Siano did not; he sat with the girls as Silthri emptied the chamberpot into the midden and washed it, and threw the ruined baskets away, and when she returned he encouraged Silthri to get a little sleep herself. When she asked him to go tell Orani he sadly shook his head. "She isn't well, and neither is Ziin; I went by her house to tell her on my way back. They may have this same fever." Silthri nodded soberly at that, worried now for both households of her family.

Finally, Siano's fever broke. Silthri poured the bird's juices into a cup and dripped some on Siano's lips, and she licked them off; she gave the rest to Dessi, who was already sitting up and delightedly babbling at "Uncle Big", and handed the bird to Oran, but he broke it in half and pointedly waited for her to start eating before he would eat. Silthri couldn't help but laugh at that, and obediently ate her half.

That night, curled around her convalescent daughters, Silthri fell soundly asleep. When she woke, late the next morning, she found all her dried fruits, forgotten on the rooftop these last two days, neatly wrapped in her linen sheet and resting on the other sleeping platform; the rest of the cloths and hides lay folded nearby. Dessi woke up and said, "where is Uncle Big?" and Silthri could only shake her head and say, "I don't know, honeycomb. I am sure he'll be back."

Indeed he was, that evening, with another bird and another skin of water. He plucked the bird, gutted it, and had it soaking in hot water in a covered clay pot on the hearth before Silthri could blink thrice, it seemed. Then she ran to him and wrapped her arms around him. "Oran, you are so good to me," said Silthri, tears in her eyes, her face buried in his chest. He wrapped those massive arms around her, and they stood there for a moment, before Silthri felt a tug at her skirt and looked down to see Dessi, standing on unsteady legs, reaching one hand up. "You came back! Uncle Big!"

Oran picked up Dessi and swung her over his head, just once. "Here I am, Little-Cute," he said cheerfully to the child. "Here I am," he added more seriously to her mother.

 

*

 

The next morning, Oran ate some of the poached bird with rush-tuber flatbreads that Silthri made; both girls were well enough to drink broth on their own, and Silthri kissed her daughters with relief, especially Siano who had swung so close to death, and ate her own share of breakfast with trembling fingers. "You have been so good to me," she said to Oran, her eyes wet with gratitude. "I have nothing to give you that can repay what you've done for me."

"I am your friend," he said with that craggy smile, and kept eating. When he was done he stood up, brushing off his kilt. "I won't be able to be back for several days, though."

"I have kept you from your hunting," said Silthri, nodding, as Dessi leapt up to throw herself at his leg and Siano, still weaker, called, "please do come back, though!" He smiled even more widely. "I promised a craftsman that I would bring him four antlers and four bundles of dried venison."

"What riches! What could he possibly be making that is worth all that?" Oran just smiled and gently squeezed her hand in his massive one, handed Dessi back to her, and climbed out of the house.

Silthri watched him go, then put the bird's bones back into the pot, along with more water, some dried mushrooms, and two handfuls of mixed grains; covering the pot, she gave the feathers to Dessi to play with and asked Siano if she felt well enough to be left. Siano, screwed up her face, but took a deep breath and bravely said, "Yes, Mama," so Silthri kissed her again, brushed her hair back with her hands, and set out to Orani's house. On the way she found Tatha playing knucklebones with friends and offered the girl dinner, breakfast, and a handful of dried figs if she would watch Silthri's daughters and help sort out the dried grapes, dried figs, and dried mushrooms from each other, an offer she eagerly took.

Orani's house smelled rather as Silthri's did, relatively clean but still of sickness, and Orani lay on one of the sleeping platforms with Ziin dozing beside her, but at least she was well enough to smile at Silthri, and her eyes were clear. Ziin gave Silthri an uncharacteristic, warm embrace; the boy must have been worried, she thought, as she held him tightly before letting go and sitting beside Orani.

"What a friend your beau Oran is," said Orani, laying her hand in Silthri's. "He brought us a fowl and told us that he was helping you."

Silthri nodded, turning over the words 'your beau' in her head, as she gently squeezed Orani's hand. "He has been so very good to me,"

"He wants the whole loaf," said Orani with a wink, and Silthri giggled, and then sobered. "The last man who was kind to me when I needed it, seemingly just to be kind... his kindness lasted till the day after I married him, and no longer."

"Oran is a very different man than Amras," said Orani, shaking her head just a bit before laying it back down. "If you trust me on anything, sister of my heart, trust me on this."

 

*

 

Half a month went past. Silthri's daughters and Ziin recovered as if nothing befell; Orani was slower to recover, but came back to her full strength. It was the time of the acorn harvest, and Silthri had just lit a fire of grass in her acorn bins to clean them, when Oran came by again. "Oran!" she called with cheer. "Good hunting?"

"Very good," he said, holding out his hand to her. In his palm was a sleek gray-green serpentine rectangular bead, a 'double-axe' bead; its upper and lower blades were so finely thinned that, if they had not been dulled, they would have been the finest of knives, with the perforation running between them through two sleek nacelles on either side. Silthri's breath caught in her throat as he laid the bead, as wide as an egg and as thin as an eggshell, in her hand. It was a treasure that would fit in a woman's palm, that would nestle at the base of her throat like a lasting kiss.

Silthri looked up at Oran, her mouth hanging open, and he smiled that craggy smile. "When I first saw you," he said, closing his large hand gently around hers, "I thought you were a goddess. I was glad to find you a mortal." Silthri's face burned, as her heart both danced at and dreaded his next question. "Silthri, will you marry me?"

Silthri sat down, the fantastic bead in her hand, and started to cry. Fate was so generous and so unkind. "I can't," she sobbed into her hands. "I can't marry you, Oran. A man like no other, and I can't marry you. I am with child. A moon-child, a child without a father." She would have said more, but the tears took her words away.

"What a wonder," said Oran warmly. "We have a child already, and we haven't even lain together yet." Silthri raised her face from her hands, her eyes still streaming. The bead was a lump of unpainted clay, compared to these words. "You will, you want, you, you..." Unable to speak for surprise and sniffling, she held out her hand to Oran, and he came to her, to enfold her hand in his and put his massive arm around her shoulders. "I have come to love you, Silthri," he said gently. "I have come to love your daughters. I know I will love any child you bear."

Silthri laid her head on Oran's chest. She felt she could rest it there forever. "I am blessed to have you, Oran" she said softly. "I will marry you." He said nothing, just held her more closely, but she knew he was smiling.


	7. Dawn City, Chapter Seven

**Chapter Seven**

If Silthri had been happy before, now, she was so happy she sometimes thought she dreamt.

  
*

Some days after she and Oran had decided to marry, a girl of perhaps seventeen, with a nasty-looking black eye, came to visit Silthri. "I am Rana, and I have come here to ask you a favor, lady."

"Call me Silthri. Come in, and tell me." Silthri gave the girl a cup of broth from the pot simmering on the hearth, and Rana looked down into her cup as she spoke, in a manner Silthri remembered well and sadly. "I was married, but, I have left my husband. He, he gave me this." She tapped her black eye gingerly. "My parents like him, more than me, I think---" Rana swallowed a sob, and Silthri laid her hand on Rana's arm. "They don't approve. They told me to go back to him, that I could not stay with them. My sister is afraid to take me in for the same reason. So, I..."

"I understand, Rana. I had to leave a husband, too." Rana nodded at Silthri's words, not yet daring to look up, as she continued. "My sister's husband farms, so she gave me a pailful of barley to give you, and my husband's--- my former husband's--- family polishes stones, so I also brought a knife." Rana pulled the knife from her belt to hand it over. It was a sleek polished thing, with a leaf-shaped blade; no ground-stone knife could be as sharp as fresh obsidian, but their edge lasted far longer.

Silthri looked at the knife in her hand, and laughed, patting Rana's arm. "Oh, my friend Rana. Keep this knife, you will need it more than I do." She almost told her to keep the barley as well, but a voice in the back of her head whispered that what is bought has more value, so she added, "I will take a basketful of barley; you should keep the rest. I do have one thing to ask you, though." Rana looked up, hope beginning to rise in her eyes as she nodded. "I will be leaving this house soon, actually. I'm getting married. The lady there, the Butterfly Maiden, this is her House, and all she asks is to be remembered."

Rana blinked, looking surprised. "That's why I came here! I dreamt of a butterfly, flying up out of the trapdoor, flying to here..."

"Then she called you, just as she called me." Silthri smiled encouragingly, and, hesitantly, Rana smiled back. "Remember her, and be sure to pass the House on to the next woman who needs it!"

*

Lying on one of three sleeping platforms in his house, Silthri lay on Oran's chest. Not just her head, but a good part of her, head to hips. One of his large, long hands lay across her back like a blanket, and she felt him breathe beneath her, felt his heart beat slowly and strongly. The largest thing about him was his gentleness, and that was saying much.

"How do you feel?" he asked softly, his voice deep even in a whisper. Silthri wriggled luxuriously for answer, and he laughed softly. "I am fine, my love." _My love_. The words tasted like dates, like honey, all the sweeter for their unexpectedness. "I am better than fine."

"Some women are ill during their pregnancies. You seem to be healthier, if anything, during yours."

"Well, I am fortunate. By and large being with child agrees with me." _Aside of having to piss all the time_ , she thought, _but there are worse things_. "Birth, though... some women bear as easily as rabbits, like my friend Zeora. I don't. But if Siano's birth didn't kill me I doubt any of the others will. Even so, if I die, Orani will happily raise my children." That was something they had settled, long ago.

"May I ask you a favor, on that?" Silthri raised her head to see that Oran had put his other arm behind his head so that he could more easily look at her. "If you die bearing this baby, which I pray you will not, may I help her raise your daughters?"

Silthri pushed herself up to kiss Oran. "You are so very good to me. And to my daughters." He smiled and kissed her again, cupping her head in his hand. "I have fallen in love with your daughters, from the first moment Dessi threw herself on me, the first moment Siano looked at me with those serious round eyes. When my first wife died I thought I was just not meant to have children, and the thought grieved me sorely, but I could not marry just to marry." Silthri nodded; he knew she understood. "And then I met you, my Sun-shining lady, and your daughters, and I knew I had found my family."

Silthri felt her eyes brimming. "You are like no man ever, Oran," she whispered, and kissed him again.

*

Zatori ran up to Silthri just as the first cold winter rains were falling. "Easy, Zatori, easy!" cried Silthri, startled. "Don't drop the baby right here!"

"Silthri, did you hear, did you hear?" Silthri took Zatori's arm and helped her down into the house and sat her down. "Silthri, the City is going to a war!"

"A war?" Silthri's experience of wars was as skirmishes between two small villages or tribes, and she had mostly heard of them. R'chue had been in one once, and had won it, but it was still frightening, waiting for the men to return, waiting to see if the other tribe came to claim them. What could it mean for a city like Lillun to be going into a war?

"The last group of traders isn't coming back!" said Zatori urgently "The Janicai attacked them and killed them, and only the two boys got away and came home to tell!" Silthri gasped at this news. Ranas had nearly gone with that party, but Orani had been ill; Ziin's friend Iltas, his partner in the Manhood Trials, had gone, and so had Adeo's husband Dennan. All of them now dead and unburied, far from home. "Oh, Bull and Earth," Silthri prayed in a whisper.

"The elders want all the able-bodied men to assemble at the Meeting Place! Cran already went!" Zatori had tears in her eyes; Silthri mentally shook herself and embraced her. "Where is your husband?"

"He went to trade today. He must have heard this news by now." Silthri held Zatori more tightly, wondering if Oran would go. _And would he return?_ She pushed that thought away. "Will they take all the men, do you think?"

"I don't know! Oh, Silthri, if our husbands go, what will we do? We are both with child!"

"The first thing we will do," said Silthri firmly, to herself as well as Zatori, "is to go comfort Adeo, who is also with child, and now has no husband."

  
*

As it happened, neither Oran nor Cran did go. Ranas did, though; Orani took it calmly, saying "If we let people kill our traders there will be no trade, they will have no obsidian and we will be poor," but she did not look happy. Ziin, weeping for his friend, hardly noticed anything around him.

The elders sent three hundred men, with Olthas the son of Elder Iltas to command them; Ziin's friend Iltas, properly Iltas-the-Lesser, had been Olthas' son. Silthri went to see them off the next morning, along with most of the City, and her heart hurt to see Olthas' grim, drawn face.

They were gone for twenty days. Orani spoke cheerfully, but tossed in her sleep; Ziin seemed to recover, but became even more serious. All over the City, women whose husbands or sons had gone struggled with the heavier tasks; Oran, with his great heart, would stop on his way to help a woman struggling to carry or to hew, and so would arrive home late and sleep early each night. Silthri took offerings to all the shrines, and sat with Orani and Zatori and the grieving Adeo, and reassured her friends and her daughters, and waited with the rest of the City.

On a cold rainy day most of their men came back; there were enough more of them than the Janicai that the City's losses were few, and besides some of the Janicai's neighbors came out to help and to share the spoils. Believing that the folk of Lillun were softened by their pleasant City lives, the Janicai had not even bothered to run until they realized that the vanishing of scout after scout must mean something; they were caught and all the adults killed, even to the women. Silthri privately wondered if any one of those deaths would bring Olthas his son back, or Ziin his playmate, but then she remembered her delight at hearing that Golas had been buried in a midden, and kept her opinion to herself.

Ranas came back with a skinny girl of about eleven years, who walked with him willingly enough, but then Ranas would never hurt a child. Blackberry, heavily pregnant, paced over, sniffed the girl, seemed to judge her fit, and went back to lie in the corner again. "Lady," the girl greeted Orani in a soft sing-song accent, kneeling and bowing her head; Orani caught Silthri's eye and laughed. "I have done this before, haven't I? What is your name, child?" she continued, raising the girl to her feet and looking her over; she was wrapped in Ranas' spare kilt and her thick brown hair had been cut short at the base of her neck. "I am called Aine," said the girl, still looking down.

"Well, Aine," said Orani, tilting the girl's face up with a gentle finger, "I am Orani, and I hope you enjoy living here. We will feed you and keep you, but you will have to work. Is that clear?"

Aine nodded her head, then jumped as Ziin lunged over, crying out. "Mother!" he protested. "Her people killed Iltas!"

"Does she look like she killed anyone, Ziin?" Orani held her hand over the quivering girl's head. "She's just a child." Ziin looked at Aine, and something changed in his face, and the girl stopped shaking and bowed her head submissively to him. Ziin huskily muttered, "That's fine. Welcome, Aine"; cautiously, she smiled, and cautiously he smiled back.

*

The war only seemed over. Having destroyed the Janicai, Lillun as a city now owned their land, so, to prevent losing it to the territory of the villages on either side, a detachment of about thirty young men immediately set off to hold it, while the elders debated what best to do with it. The elders ended up splitting between those led by Iltas, who thought another herding village would be a good idea, and the priests and priestesses and their friends, led by Tirano, who thought that Lillun had enough herding villages, and who wanted to build a settlement where traders could stay and which would have a mighty house dedicated to all the deities of Lillun. Zeora, whose husband's mother was one of the elders, gave out bits of news like pieces of dried fruit whenever Silthri and Orani visited her throughout the winter; she found the strife between the elders exciting, but it worried Orani, and Silthri was not sure what to think of it. Eventually the settlement was decided to be another herding village, with no house for the gods, but apparently not without some fissures in the elders' council, some remaining grudges.

By the time it was decided, however, Silthri had more pressing matters to attend to. Adeo, who had been despondent since she lost Dennan, went into labor just as the first snows were falling; when Dennan's young brother came to tell Silthri she wrapped herself up to go to Adeo, despite the weather and her own heavy state of pregnancy, but Oran stopped her with one large gentle hand. "You are too far gone yourself, and it is cold up there."

"Adeo is still so sad! She needs someone to tell her that one can live through bearing a child whose father is dead. I did it, I need to tell her."

Orani, who was visiting, stood up, shaking her head. "You have told her, Silthri. It won't help to risk your own strength and the baby's safety. It is between her and the Shaper and the Mother now." Silthri looked from her sister to her husband and back again, then unwrapped herself again and heavily sat back down.

Two mornings after that Oran came home shortly after he had left, and Silthri could see the sad news in his face. "Adeo is dead?" He nodded grimly, and, picking up his wife as if she were a child, sat with her while she cried. "I should have gone to her!" wept Silthri over and over, leaning on his chest; Oran waited till she could hear him again before saying in his quiet deep voice, "she was in the Hand of the Mother, the Arms of the Shaper. Not every woman comes back out again, you know better than I. But you will, Silthri. You will come back to me."

  
*

  
Indeed, she did. Just about a month later, Silthri bore a little girl who at first seemed likely to die, she was so small and unready to suck. However, Sintha slowly grew stronger, even though she was always small, with huge dark eyes and long fine brown hair; Siano took special care of her from the first, feeding her as soon as she could eat food other than milk and watching out for her tiny sister. Sometimes Silthri would watch them and almost wonder who Sintha's mother was actually meant to be, herself or Siano.

The years began to run together in happiness. Oran entrusted Silthri with whatever he caught, and her older daughters helped her slice up the meat and hang it to dry in the second storey or on thorn-wood frames on the roof, to scrape the hides, and to save, dry, and bundle the bones, horns, antlers, and feathers; most of the hunting-goods Silthri traded, both with Orani and by herself, while because he no longer needed to do his own trading Oran had more time to hunt, so both households prospered. Silthri found that, despite how different they appeared, her blood mixed well with Oran's; she caught two children by him in as many years, a strong boy and a strapping girl, and of evenings she would watch her houseful of children play together, the three little ones led by Dessi and protected by Siano, and feel rich beyond all words.

Orani's household grew fruitful as well; that first cautious smile between Aine and Ziin had struck a spark that caught a flame. When Aine, at thirteen well filled out by Orani's generosity and City living, finally went to Orani to tell her that she was expecting by Ziin, Orani laughed till she was fit to burst. "You mysterious children!" she cried. "Why didn't you tell me earlier?"

"I thought you might not approve," said Ziin, and Orani stood to face him, her hands on her hips; her curls might have flecks of gray at the temples now, but they could toss as ever. "Where would you be if I didn't? Still having made a child, that's where, my empty-headed son. Fortunately for you, Aine is as fine a young girl as I have ever met, though what she sees in you I do not know." Silthri had to stifle a giggle at that; Aine couldn't hold back her giggle, and Ziin snorted. "I could wish you had waited, though, my dear," said Orani more seriously to Aine, putting her hands on the girl's shoulders. "I bore Ziin when I was thirteen, and I was plumper than you are now; I can tell you that it's even more difficult, giving birth when so young. But, if the Mother is willing and the Shaper made you to it, I will help you all I can to come through this."

It was difficult, and Silthri ended up suckling little Rani for a week while Aine recovered, but soon Orani had a daughter-by-marriage and a granddaughter, then two more grandchildren in short order, to dance around her house and rumple its order and delight her heart.

*

One bright summer day, Silthri went down to the Trading Place, a bundle of dried venison and a bundle of bones swinging from one hand, an antler and an empty hide pail in her other hand, and Enaf in a hide sling on her back, pulling on wisps of her hair, while Siano danced after her, hand in hand with Zeora's oldest daughter, who had come along for the errand.

Silthri gave the antler to Siano to deliver to a craftsman and, watching the girls run off into the crowd, reflected on how she had come to love going trading. She loved the abundance of the City; she couldn't think of a thing she could want that someone didn't have to trade. She loved the throngs of people, proof in their flesh of the City's prosperity, the people of Lillun, wearing scraped hides and draped leopard skins and cloth, plain or dyed or stamped with patterns, and jewelry of imported shells and teeth, pigment-stained clay beads, and polished or knapped stone and metal beads, wildly diverse and wonderfully adorned, and yet all with that City look. Threading their way between the City folk came the wild-looking tribesmen who had come bearing goods such as ocher and wild animals and wild seeds, dressed solely in skins and furs, using animal tails as girdles and wearing jewelry of bone and teeth and grooved stones; not least because of all the visitors, the Trading Place had about three men for every two women on most days. This had been more important in the years when Silthri was just learning to trade, and how to use flirtation in trading, and during the year that she was not married, but even now as a married mother sliding towards the middle of her life, Silthri sometimes swung her hips and smiled charmingly at friends and handsome visitors, and it always warmed her blood to be appreciated.

So Silthri walked through the Trading Place, the trodden earth dry and warm between her feet, greeting and embracing and smiling and flirting and trading, with a stop to suckle Enaf, wending her way to the grassy margin where the herdsmen stood with their ewes and lambs and even the occasional tame aurochs cow. This day, she had a mind to get some yogurt to dip grilled venison strips into for that night's evening meal.

As Silthri walked over to the herders she saw a tall man, wearing a rather ragged hide kilt and necklaces of bone rings and carved horn, looking down his hooked nose at the people all around him. Just as he looked at her she recognized him, and her stomach went cold within her; still, she was not going to act the way Eligo had, she told herself as she forced herself to keep walking forward. "Greetings, Amras," she called formally. "I have come to trade." She hefted her pail, now half-full of mixed trade-grain.

Amras smiled at her, but his eyes glinted like obsidian chips. "Whose baby is that?"

"My husband is Oran, a hunter. This is our son, Enaf." Silthri raised the pail higher. "Will you give me some milk for this grain?"

Amras, his mind clearly not on trading, took a step closer, and Silthri unconsciously stepped back. "Plump little child. You must be taking care of him, suckling him. Amnat was a skinny little thing."

Anger made the daylight flash black before her eyes. "Have you waited all these years to say that to me?" Silthri took a deep breath, and did not let herself throw a handful of grain into his face. "I came here to trade, Amras."

"I came to see how the City had changed, these last few years. What changes, indeed." Amras looked at Silthri as if he would strip her dress off with his eyes. She found herself holding the pail of grain before herself as a shield, and shook her head, both at herself and at him. "I see you don't need grain," she said, and turned to go; blessedly, Enaf babbled in her ear, reminding her of where her life now lay.

"Silthri!" called Amras, and her feet slowed as if not her own. "I have an obedient, good wife now, a wife who takes care of my children and isn't wanton!"

'Why, because you beat all the will out of this one?' Silthri wanted to ask, but their talk had gone on far too long already. Clenching her fist so that the nails dug into her palm, telling herself to behave, she forced herself to put one foot before the other until she was halfway across the Trading Place.

Siano ran up, dancing with happiness, holding a swirled, lenticular agate bead aloft. "Mama, look, Master Amnef's son Deonas gave me a bead! Mama?" Silthri smiled at her eldest daughter, her frozen insides thawing at the sight of her beautiful child. "Yes, yes it is a beautiful bead." Silthri agreed, walking away from the day's trading, away from Amras for the last time.

*

Silthri's life went on, beating with the pulse of the City and turning round with the seasons of Nature, as her children grew and her husband grew more rugged and more quiet and ever more happy with her. Silthri herself grew plumper, her breasts softened and lowered by nursing, her belly rounded, her hips wider; Oran told her she was lovely as ever, that she was growing to look like a goddess, and, looking up into his eyes, she could see herself as he saw her, see that she did.

However, even as she was growing to look like a rounded, fertile goddess, Silthri's fertility was slacking with her age. She bore a daughter who barely lived long enough to be named, then a child with half a head who needed to be sung over and gently starved, and then she miscarried twice, the second one especially painfully.

Silthri lay on the sleeping platform after the second miscarriage, still too weak to rise after two days. Siano, now a maiden of fourteen, sat beside her head, spinning field-retted flax; coming to know cloth late, Silthri had never become a good spinner or weaver, but her older daughters were quite good at both, and Siano was at that time carefully spinning the thinnest flaxen thread she could in order to make herself a fine pale-golden dress to show off her blossoming maiden charms. Dessi had been dispatched to haul back a basketful of water, and the three younger children played together, every so often coming over to check on and kiss their ailing mother. Surrounded by her children, Silthri may have been ill, but her heart was happy within her.

Sintha and Zeelo danced together, spinning around, and Silthri watched them, noting how even though Zeelo weres two years younger, she was just as tall as her sister, and more sturdily built. Silthri wondered, as she often did when looking at her younger girls, what spirit she had danced the Moon with, to catch such an ethereal child as Sintha, while Zeelo's thick black hair, broad forehead and sturdy long limbs bore the unmistakable imprint of Oran.

As if her thought had summoned him, Oran swung down through the trapdoor. "Papa!" cried all the children, including Siano, as they ran to him and he swept them all up in a warm hug. Silthri's eyes prickled happily as she watched this everyday delight.

"I need for you all to go up to the roof for me," Oran asked the children, who went up, herded by Siano. Dessi returned just then to ask, "where is everyone going?"

"Papa Oran wants us up on the roof," Silthri heard Siano reply as only an older sister could say to a younger, followed by a louder, "pour that on me and you'll just have to go get more water!"

"Bring in the water, Dessi," called Oran, winking at his wife, who lay silently laughing. Dessi brought down the water-basket and emptied it into the clay waterpot; then she made as if to sit down, and Oran gently lifted her by her shoulders and placed her on the bottom rung of the ladder. "I'm going, I'm going!" said the irrepressible Dessi, climbing up with an exaggerated pout.

Silthri laughed till her innards ached. "Oh, our children," she said, holding out her hand to Oran, who sat beside her. "Do you need to talk to me, my love?"

"Yes, about children." Oran stroked her hair, gathering his words, and she waited. "I hate to see you so ill, Silthri."

"I will live," she said with a smile. "I've stopped bleeding."

"Even so. I wonder if we should stop trying for more children. We have quite the flock already."

Silthri made a face. "I would not care to stop lying with you. You are a wonder and a pleasure, you know." She winked, and Oran laughed. "And so are you. Still, I don't want to see you broken with childbearing, ill with miscarriages."

"I don't want that for myself. I suppose I must start counting days." Oran smiled, and, picking her up, bed furs and all, held her upon his chest and kissed her brow. Relaxing in her husband's arms, Silthri sighed with happiness.

  
*

  
When Siano was sixteen she decided to marry Deonas, an accomplished young obsidian knapper. It was early in the fall, the richest time of the year; Ranas had recently died, so Orani and Ziin and Aine and their three children had all come to spend their forty days with Silthri and Oran. With Deonas' father Amnef and his young brother always visiting as well, their house was a riot of people, so Silthri and Siano escaped up the ladder for a moment of privacy in the warm sunset light. Sitting with her daughter on the roof, amazed and proud that her firstborn baby was of an age to marry, Silthri said to her, "what do you want for your wedding?"

Siano thought for a moment. "A feast. A grand feast, for all our families." Silthri looked out across the City to the grassy plain beyond, and the setting sun led her eye to a flat patch that would be perfect. "I think we can do that," she said, and Siano smiled.

And so, on morning of the wedding day, Silthri and Orani had Ziin dig two fire-pits for them, while Dessi led her little siblings and Aine's older children in clearing the chosen patch of stones; they arranged the stones around it in a spiral with an open circle at its center and a hearth just outside the circle at the north. As the children fanned out to look for dry grasses for the fire, Silthri brought a chunk of wood from her house to provide coals, while Siano and Deonas lugged between them a hide pail of clay balls to lay in the fire; when she turned her head she caught them giving each other the same hot secret glances she and Dexias had shared on their wedding day. Her heart hurt with a sweet pain, and she smiled, before hurrying back to her house to cook some more.

At last, all too soon, the day rose towards noon; because of the feast, the wedding would be early. Siano's friends and sister Dessi dressed her, winding her in her filmy linen dress and wrapping her waist with a red-and-blue girdle that chimed with copper, a heirloom from Oran's first wife, adorning her with jewelry and painting her face and all the while making her laugh. Silthri looked at her beautiful daughter, her curly hair wound atop her head with a woolen fillet, Silthri's own butterfly bead at her neck, and kissed her carefully, so as to not rub the red pigment from her cheek. "Siano, you are a magnificent woman," she said, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, tears mirrored in Siano's. "I bless you, my daughter, and I bless your marriage."

"Thank you, Mother." Siano squeezed her hand fit to break it, but her voice was calm and even, the voice that Silthri had learned from her stepmother and passed on to her daughter. Siano kissed Silthri's cheek just as carefully, then ran up the ladder like a butterfly riding the breeze, flying to her marriage, to her future.

Silthri had planned to sit at the feast site, preparing the foods that needed a middle time to cook, but Orani had laughed down that plan the moment she heard it. "Your first child, the one who opened your womb, is getting married. Go see her dance her wedding! I can sit here, I can cook." Silthri had protested, "she was born into your hands. You have as much right to see her married as I," but Orani kissed her cheek and shook her head. "Go, Silthri, go to the wedding. Stand beside your husband now and Siano's father." Silthri blinked at that last word, then understood, and nodded; now, she stood, in her seal-stamped wool dress, on Amnef's roof, clapping her hands and singing to her daughter and her new son-by-marriage, with Oran beside her lending his deep bass note. The young couple sank to their knees, and Deonas pulled Siano over atop himself; she raised her head, caught Silthri's eye, and winked before leaning down to kiss Deonas. Silthri laughed, catching Oran's hand to squeeze it, feeling Dexias stand at her other side as if he were still solid flesh, so happy she could glow.

After the wedding everyone swept through the three houses, Orani's, Silthri's, and Amnef's, to bring food and hides down to the feast. Siano's piled hair had fallen during the wedding dance, so when they reached the feasting place Deonas tied it back with the woolen ribbon, sneaking a kiss to her neck as he did; his father saw, laughed and patted Deonas' shoulder, and Silthri smiled to see that, and indeed to see all of them there, together and happy, and to see the entire feast, surrounded by the shining stones and lit glowingly by the sunset.

Beside large baskets of water sat a large joint of aurochs, which Orani had roasted, and five barley and four wheat flatbreads, all on a wooden tray. There was a basket of fruit, pomegranates and figs and grapes, and a basket of wild herbs, which Aine and Dessi had gathered the day before, and a large dish of green peas and barley baked with snails and a jointed rabbit, the same dish Silthri remembered from her first wedding. Amnef had brought a basket of roasted nuts, and Silthri had made, because she knew Siano loved it, the kind of "bread" that is made by turning a very thick nut porridge out on a board and allowing it to set; there were three of them, two of sweet acorns and one of chestnuts with honey. Orani sat beside the hearth, making skewers out of fresh venison and wild mushrooms, and Zeora's daughter Amnao brought a pot of yogurt, her mother's gift.

All eyes turned to Silthri expectantly, and she blushed like the girl she had been when Siano was born, but she knew what she had to do. Breaking off a piece of the wheat flatbread, she raised it to those who could not be there in the flesh: to Siano's dead baby siblings, to Dexias her father, to Deonas' mother, and also, Silthri felt, plain as sunlight, to Enitheris, to Dexias' parents and Deonas' grandparents, to all the generations of people who had built Lillun and lived in it and loved in it and died in it and were buried in it.

Singing softly, not even knowing she had been singing till she heard herself, Silthri crumbled the piece of bread, and a passing wind caught the crumbs and bore them away. She breathed, felt the loving spirits all around them withdraw again, still near as a breath, and held out her hands to Deonas and Siano, who blinked, looked around at their family, then smiled as one and said, "let's eat!"

Silthri watched her family, now combined and enlarged, feast; she watched Dessi feed her siblings, watched Siano and Deonas feed each other, watched Orani and Amnef joke cheerfully. She squeezed Oran's hand, feeling as if this happiness could last forever.

It never does.  



	8. Dawn City, Chapter Eight

**Chapter Eight.**

Silthri stood, wrapped in a woolen blanket against the winter cold, on the roof of her house. It was perhaps not the wisest place to be, but she needed to be outside for a moment. Beside her stood Dessi, who seemed to have decided to take over the care of her parents since Siano had gotten married; Silthri's second daughter was currently scanning the sky with narrowed eyes, a slingshot in her hand.

A bird appeared, soaring over the City. Silthri stood still as it flew closer; Dessi slowly, carefully raised her sling, aimed, shot. The bird wheeled and fell, several houses over. Silthri kissed Dessi quickly on the cheek before the girl ran off to fetch her prize; she was proud of her daughter, but the joy had gone out of seeing her skill, when the reason she hunted was because Oran lay sick to death beside all three of the smaller children, struck down by the plague assailing Lillun.

*

In a city as large as Lillun, someone was always ill, just because of how many people lived there. However, one day during the winter rains, it suddenly seemed as if half the City were constantly coughing, a deep wet cough; soon, most of those who were coughing took to their beds, tossing and delirious with fever, coughing up slime. Then people began to drown in the slime.

When Oran realized what was upon him he tried to leave, but all three of the younger children were already coughing, and Silthri pressed him back down onto the bed. "You are my husband, and you are going to stay here, and I will care for you." He smiled weakly and closed his eyes; he had not yet opened them again. As if he knew his children lay curled beside him, a dreadful parody of those cold winter nights when they had climbed into bed with their parents, he had not tossed in his fever but lay still, his wide chest slowly rising and falling, his breath rattling and gurgling within him.

It was, Silthri reflected grimly as she swabbed her husband's and children's mouths with water, like when Dessi and Siano fell ill, but far far worse. Neither Siano nor Orani nor Zeora could help her, nor she them; Deonas, his brother, and Siano's baby daughter all lay ill, as did all eight of Zeora's unmarried children. Also dreadfully ill were Ziin and Orani and all Ziin's children, only Aine to care for them, and she heavily pregnant. Silthri debated asking Dessi to go help Aine, except that if Dessi fell ill she wanted her daughter home with her, and the way Dessi was working herself to exhaustion, Silthri was worried that she would.

What would happen if Silthri fell ill, she tried not to think about.

It was winter, so trade and crafting were slow in the City anyway, but now they ceased; almost all people in Lillun who were well had ill family to care for. As Dessi dragged a worn hide pail back and forth, holding one hand over the cracked seam to keep it from leaking, Silthri chided herself for not having traded for another before this plague. Still, how could she have known? No one had known, not even the priests and priestesses; Silthri sometimes wondered bitterly how they had not foreseen, then pushed that thought aside as fruitless. Now they knew.

Slowly many victims of the plague recovered, came back to sense, coughed up the last of the slime, and rose shivering from their beds to recover their strength. More quickly, many others sank beneath it and died. Deonas arrived on a snowy day to find Silthri and Dessi, tears running freely down their cheeks, slowly digging out the largest sleeping platform. Enaf lay beside their feet, curled up, bound gently to keep his stiff limbs flexed; Oran lay on the platform where he had died, looking still as if he slept, but his wide chest was still and cold. Silthri had carried Sintha and Zeelo to the third platform, where they slept unaware of their father's and brother's deaths, seemingly on the mend, but at the moment that was not much comfort. Taking this all in, Deonas kissed each woman and said "I'll get my father."

He returned with his father Amnef, and also with Cran, who wept and dug in equal measure; Zatori was dead. Her children had lived, and were with Zeora's family, helping them bury the three children who had died, but Zatori had hidden being ill till she could no longer, and now she was dead, and Cran wept for his wife as he dug. Siano arrived at Silthri's house a bit later, wet-breasted and wet-eyed; Deonas had originally come to tell Silthri that her grandchild had also died. Silthri embraced her, clinging to her oldest daughter as if she could not let go, both women crying silently. What was there to say amidst this disaster?

Between all of them, they lifted Oran into his final bed, and laid Enaf beside him. Singing softly so as to not wake the convalescent girls, they laid in Oran's necklaces and best knife, and Enaf's favorite sling, and covered them with earth and smoothed it flat. Silthri turned away, as she had at a previous husband's funeral, and again she swooned, and this time she did not feel the floor when she hit it.

  
*

  
Silthri woke, if that were the word, coughing, a haze before her eyes, a haze in her head. She was ill. She didn't have time to be ill! She tried to rise, and her arms gave out, dumping her back into the furs.

"Mama, lie still." Siano gently, firmly pressed Silthri down and drew a blanket over her; Silthri tried to look at her daughter, but the familiar face blurred and washed away. "You are in my house. Everything is fine."

"Where---" Silthri choked, and coughed, and felt slime bubble forth from her mouth. Siano held a basket to her cheek, and she expelled the slime with coughs that wrenched her insides, while Siano guessed and answered her questions. "My sisters are here. Sintha and Zeelo are awake, and Dessi is resting. She's not ill. Deonas and Ranef and Papa Amnef are all fine. The baby---" Siano's voice broke, somewhere beyond Silthri's racking coughing, but she continued. "You know about the baby."

Finally, the coughing was done. "Orani?" Silthri gasped, closing her eyes, sinking into the bed. This was the last news she needed to know before she could rest.

"Ziin is fine, and so are Rani and Oran-the-lesser. Who I suppose is now just Oran." Siano sobbed at that thought; tears flooded Silthri's closed eyes. She heard her daughter sniffle and wipe her eyes and continue. "Aunt Orani is on the mend, Zaona died, though, and Aine is very ill. They have gone from worrying that she will lose the baby to worrying that she will lose her life." Siano laid her head down on the bed platform, her arms across Silthri. "What did the City do, Mama, to bring this disaster down? What did we do?"

Silthri shook her head helplessly. "Don't know," she tried to say, but darkness was already coming up to claim her.

*

For the rest of her life, Silthri remembered that illness as a strange fever dream, a timeless haze where she floated close to death and the slime in her lungs threatened to drown her. Her whole body aching worse than any beating, she coughed, and licked water from her lips, and coughed again. Once or twice she heard Siano say, "You promised me, Mama, that you would not die. Remember? You promised!"; remembering indeed, she turned toward her daughter's voice, fighting her way up through the slime and the sickness. She was not going to die. Dexias had not come for her, Oran did not need for her to join him. Silthri told herself she was not going to die, and fought her way up, back towards the light.

She opened her gummy eyes to rain-filtered sunshine. Raising one hand to scrub her face, she looked around the house; it was evidently afternoon, from the slant of the light and the fact that the only others in the house were Amnef, asleep on the other platform, and Sintha, quietly playing with stones and kindling. Seeing movement, Sintha looked up at her mother and ran over with a happy shriek. "Mama! Mama!" She flung her little arms around Silthri's neck and covered her face with kisses.

Silthri laughed and embraced her daughter. "I'm here, Sintha, I'm here. Easy, easy, get the basket?" Sintha fetched it, and Silthri turned and coughed, the slime reminding her that she was not well as yet. Amnef, woken by Sintha, came over with a dipperful of water and a smile. "How are you?"

"Better, I suppose." Silthri blinked at his face and her daughter's, swimming in and out of blurriness. At least she could see them. "Where is everyone?"

"Out hunting and gathering. Dessi and Zeelo are fierce girls! I've never had so many birds and small game in my life!" Silthri laughed at that, which unfortunately brought on more coughing, and that left her limp and weary. Sintha cried, "Mama?" again, and Silthri pried her eyes open long enough to reassure her daughter. "I just need to rest, Sintha," she said, stroking the silky brown hair; Sintha smiled and kissed Silthri again, and Silthri smiled, already falling asleep.

*

Winter gave way to Spring; the last victims of the plague recovered, or were buried in a common grave, adorned with flowers and paved with clay, because the houses could hold no more dead. People went back to their homes, whether or not their forty days were over, bringing rush-brooms and fine white plaster, to sweep and to plaster, to sing and to weep. Zaton painted many spirals of endlessness that spring, and many vultures.

Spring flowers began to bloom, and many marriages were made between those widowed by the plague; Ziin married Olthas' daughter Isti, Cran married the younger daughter of the priestess Tirano, and Amnef married the widow of his friend Zoran, the man who had taught Deonas how to flake obsidian. Several men paid court to Silthri, including Olas, the brother of Amras and Zeora, who had been following in his father's path with two wives before they both died in the plague. Silthri laughed at him, telling him that she had enough children already, and he took it in good humor and found himself two more wives among the City's young widows. It was not that the dead were forgotten; every night Ziin pressed a kiss to the sleeping platform, beneath which Aine lay, before turning to wrap his arms around Isti. It was that life went on. Silthri knew hers would too, but for the moment it went on in caring for Orani, who had never quite recovered, Siano, who was pregnant again, and her younger daughters, and in watching Dessi blooming into a maiden and dancing her first romance with the son of the Mother's priestess Efani.

Silthri sat on Orani's roof one sunny spring day, sewing rabbit and cat furs together into a bed fur. Furs were expensive in Lillun these days, because so many had been fouled beyond redemption when people died in them. Silthri watched Orani and worried as she sewed; the plague had left Orani thin and weak, her breasts and belly hanging on her like empty sacks, her curly hair more than half grey. She had surrendered the running of the house to Isti, who cared for Orani and listened to her advice but had her own definite ideas, so sometimes Orani grumbled to Silthri like an old woman about Isti's management. No, Silthri corrected herself sadly, Orani _was_ an old woman now. Her heart hurt her as she watched the sister of her heart sewing tiny stitches, shivering and complaining of how cold the day was. Silthri pulled a wool cloak more firmly around Orani and pushed her thoughts away and kept sewing.

Cran came by, a bundle of thin sticks over his shoulder. "Hello, my gracious ladies," he said, making both women laugh. "May I join you this evening?"

"Certainly," said Orani. "But where is Inao?" Cran made a face, sitting down beside Orani. "Still attending her mother at another meeting of the elders," he answered. "They seem to be meeting all the time, these days."

"Well," Silthri said, and then stopped herself, realizing that what she was about to say was, 'the priests and priestesses have something to answer for, having not foreseen the plague.' Wed to a priestess' daughter, Cran did not need to hear those words. "Well, they must have much to do this year, after the plague," Silthri managed to finish. Cran looked at her, his eyes narrowing as if he had heard her thought; then he nodded and smiled again. "I told her that by the time she returns I will have forgotten her face," he said cheerfully, and both women laughed at that.

  
*

  
A month later, Cran's face and words were more serious, as he sat at dinner in Silthri's house. The elders had split again, between the priests and priestesses and the 'strong families', as they were sometimes known. Apparently Olthas had claimed that the priests and priestesses had not known of the looming disaster because the Mother no longer spoke to them or cared for them. Tirano, supported by her daughters, had said, "who are you to speak in the name of the Mother?" and Olthas had responded, "her child, just as we all are," and what answer could be made to that? Cran's wife had come to him weeping that night, and he was troubled, remembering the city of his birth. "I quarreled so with the headman," he remembered, drawing down his brows, "and he cursed me, said the crops were blighted because of me, and had me driven out. Even my own brothers stood against me. I am afraid to see the same happen here."

"Here?" said Silthri incredulously. "Olthas is one man, it would take the majority of the elders to decide such a thing. Besides, we just lost half a thousand people. We don't need to lose one more."

"Not here," agreed Orani, shaking her head. "Olthas is angry, the elders are angry, the whole City is angry. Anger is part of grieving. But the anger will go, as the rest of grief goes."

Cran looked mollified, and nodded.

*

It was almost full summer; Dessi was planning to dance the Summerdance this year, and to marry her sweetheart Dinas. Silthri sat on her roof, sorting a pailful of nuts by kind and quality, when Dessi suddenly came running across the roofs and plunged into the house. "Dessi!" called Silthri, startled. "Dessi, what happened?"

"No time, Mama!" Silthri climbed down to find that Dessi had laid out a deerhide on a platform, and was throwing items into it: a folded woolen dress, a bone pin, a bundle of venison, a string of dried fish, a linen fillet, her comb and mirror and makeup. Dessi was frantically packing. "What are you doing?" asked Silthri, mystified. "Where are you going?" Her normally talkative daughter ran past her, kissing her briefly, dodging her grasp, and fetched a chunk of raw obsidian and threw it onto the pile, followed by a necklace of clay and lead beads and a ground-stone knife in its sheath.

Two men popped through the trapdoor, without even asking. "Dessi, come with us," said one; Silthri recognized him as one of Thas' younger sons, one of the youngest men to go to the war against the Janicai those eleven years ago. The other one advanced; Silthri stood in his way, scenting danger to her child. "What is going on here?" Silthri demanded; the young man stood before her, not backing down. "Please, Mother Silthri," he said, respectfully but coolly. "I don't want to have to hurt you."

"Don't! I'm coming! Don't you touch my mother!" Dessi threw in a linen dress and gathered up her pack, then ducked around Silthri to start up the ladder; Silthri felt dread and confusion battling in her gut. "Dessi, where are you going? Tell me!"

"Goodbye, Mother. I love you, tell my sisters I love them. Don't interfere, please!" Dessi delivered this speech as she ran up the ladder, herded by the two men; Silthri climbed up to see them grasp Dessi's arms and start hurrying her west, towards the Meeting Place, so she ran after them. In her haste she tripped once and lost sight of them, but kept going.

Slightly more than a hundred people, men, women, children down to babes in arms, stood on the far side of the Meeting Place, away from the City; Silthri saw, as she climbed over the houses, Dessi's escort deliver her to the group, and Dinas emerge from it to wrap his arms around her as the men who had brought Dessi joined the half-circle of men around the group, forming a wall between them and the City. With shock, Silthri recognized faces in the group: aged Tirano and her daughters; Cran, holding his wife's and young daughter's hands, his old patched hide pack on his back stuffed to bursting; Zeora's daughter Amnao, standing with her husband, a young priest, and two ewes on rope leashes. In the circle of men around them Silthri also recognized faces, faces of men who had gone to fight with the Janicai and men who had been too young to go, such as Ziin. Shaking, she rushed into the crowd surrounding this bizarre scene, seeking to find out what was happening to her friends, and to her daughter.

"People of Lillun, hear me!" Olthas stood with arms raised, at the head of the semicircle of men, wearing a leopard-skin hood and kilt, dressed in resplendent copper and lead arm-rings and a necklace of long teeth, looking fierce. Silthri could almost have been swayed by his impressive appearance, his confident voice, except that in the group of people he held prisoner stood her daughter, her friends, children she had watched grow and friends she had traded with, all good people, and the priestess Tirano, a dignified aged woman who deserved far, far better treatment. Silthri held onto her anger and clenched her fists, looking for a way to retrieve her daughter and end this, whatever it was.

"The plague that swept us this winter," Olthas went on, "came on us as a surprise. Not even our wise people knew of its approach. Do you want to know why, people of Lillun? It was the angry breath of the Mother! She said that she is sick of Her corrupt priesthood! She has closed Her mouth to them, and closed Her hand to us, until we cast them out and all their followers!"

Silthri's blood ran cold. Cran had been right. Tirano's elder daughter stepped forward, to cry, "this is wrong!" before two of the men in the circle could push her back into the group, knocking her down. When she made to rise, one pointed a spear at her to keep her down, and the others produced their spears and knives and pointed them at the others in the group. Cries and murmurs rippled through the crowd. "No!" Silthri cried, seeing a spear pointed at her daughter Dessi. "No!"

"Yes!" screamed a woman in the crowd. Silthri turned with the crowd and saw Eligo, standing forth, shaking her fist. "Yes! Cast them out! Cast out all these newcomers who were not born here, who have brought poison and plague to our City!"

"You speak nonsense!" screamed Silthri, wishing she could strike Eligo down with her very glare, but the damage was done. A growl ran through the crowd, and Olthas smiled; turning to Tirano he said, "you see, woman? All of Lillun knows. Now, will you leave, or will my friends dispose of you?"

Tirano looked past him at the people of the City, and sighed, and shook her head. Then she turned to her daughters, to all the people who stood behind her. "Come, children," she said, and, back straight, she began to lead them away to the south.

The crowd surged forward, as if pushing them away; Silthri let herself be borne with them as she screamed at the top of her lungs, "Where will you go?" Where _could_ they go? Once they left the lands of Lillun, they would be in other tribes' lands all the way to the coast; there was nowhere they could settle.

Tirano's elder daughter turned, hearing the question. "To the Big Island in the midst of the sea! Ow!" Someone had thrown a rock; she held her head and leaned on her sister, as the group kept walking. Dessi turned her head, and Silthri frantically waved, hoping her daughter could see her. Dessi did, and smiled, and waved back, and for her efforts had to duck another rock; turning and grasping Efani's hand in one hand, still holding Dinas' hand in her other, Dessi walked away from her mother, as lost to Silthri as if she were dead. Even more so.

Silthri fell to her knees. The Big Island was a trader's tale! That there were islands beyond the Copper Island, out in the sea to the south and west, and that one of them was large and shaped like a giant fish, lush and uninhabited---there was no such thing! They would row out to sea till they drowned! Her daughter, her friends, they were being borne to their deaths! Silthri rose again, to run after them, and a man caught her. Ziin caught her, and held her, even when she beat on his chest with her fists. "Let me go! Let me go you weevil, you turd, you betrayer! Let me go save my child!"

"Aunt Silthri, you have three more living children who need you." Ziin held her firmly, pinning her arms to her sides. She kicked him, and he winced and sighed. "Aunt Silthri, if you run after them you must join them. Your other daughters need you."

"Dessi needs me!" Silthri cried, but she knew he was right; hating herself for her weakness, she began to cry, and her legs gave out, dumping her against Ziin, who lifted her in his arms and carried her back into the City, back to his mother.

  
*

  
"Ziin, how _could_ you?" Orani sat up against the wall, propped on a pile of hides, Silthri still weeping uncontrollably, her head in Orani's lap. Ziin stood before his mother, his arm around Isti, looking stubborn, saying nothing. Isti was weeping herself, but Silthri hardly noticed anything outside her tears. Watching Dessi walking away had been like watching another child die.

"I do not know what to say to you," said Orani in a low voice. "I do not know if you are my son anymore. You grew up with Dessi and Amnao. They cheered for you when you became a man, they dressed your wives for your weddings. How could you do this?"

"It was better than seeing them dead!" Ziin finally blurted. "I don't know, Mother, I don't know if Olthas is actually right." Orani snorted, but let her son continue. "I don't know what sort of battle he has had with Prie---with Tirano and her daughters. I just know that he wanted them dead, and the other elders gave them into his hand; it took ten of us pleading with him, it took me and Ninef pleading with him as his daughters' husbands, to convince him to exile them. At least they are alive!"

"For now, anyway." Orani looked down at Silthri, weeping as if she could never stop. "Do you think that consoles your aunt? Do you think that consoles Aunt Zeora, weeping in her house?"

Ziin shook his head. watching Silthri cry. Isti knelt beside her, her hands on Silthri's arm. "Aunt Silthri, please forgive us. Please forgive my father. He must have done what he thought was right for Lillun."

Part of Silthri wanted to slap the girl, but she raised her head to look at her; Isti was still crying, a beseeching look on her face. "Isti," Silthri touched her cheek. "Pretty, pretty Isti. Do you think your father could forgive me, if I took you from him?" Isti buried her face in her hands, and Silthri wearily dragged herself to a sitting position, trying to stop crying. "I am tired of losing my children," she said in a dull voice, not knowing if anyone heard. Orani put her arm around her, and Ziin raised his wife to her feet and took her over to the other platform; they all sat in misery, there being nothing more to say.

*

  
Much later, Silthri lay on the platform where Dexias was buried; Ziin had taken his wife with him to stay with Sintha and Zeelo for the night, leaving Silthri with Orani and Rosehip, Blackberry's daughter and successor, who crawled into Silthri's bed and lay warmly and comfortingly beside her. Silthri thought she would never sleep, staring into the darkness, until she heard baritone snoring and turned her head to see Dexias asleep beside her, not the little dog.

'I must be asleep', she said, or thought she said; he opened those hazel eyes and smiled at her. "Why of course you are. You need it, too." She leaned over him, her hand over his chest. He felt as if he were real....

"I kiss that way, too," he said, waggling his eyebrows as he always had, and Silthri laughed and kissed him warmly and laid her head on his chest. "Dexias. I have missed you."

"And I you, my love." He kissed the top of her head. "You have done well by our daughters."

"I failed Dessi." Again she stood in the sunshine, watching Dessi walking away, watching the entire group walk away, watching them fall off the horizon... Dexias squeezed her hand, shaking his head. "Dessi will live and prosper, I promise you. She will have more living children to bury her than you will when your time comes."

"How do you know?" Silthri looked up at Dexias, and the Sun was behind his head, making him glow, burning her eyes. "Because I will be there with her," he said warmly, burning brighter and brighter----"

The Sun was high in the day, shining through the skylight onto her face. Silthri sat up, feeling exhausted and thirsty, but before she rose she kissed her fingers and pressed the kiss to the platform. "Thank you, my love," she whispered to Dexias. "Thank you."  



	9. Dawn City, Chapter Nine

Dawn City, Chapter Nine

 

  
This chapter has my biggest homage to Jane Jacobs' _The Economy of Cities_ , the book that taught me economics. But then, this whole novel is a shout-out to that book I love that book, and anyone interested in economics and/or cities would probably find something useful in it.

 **Chapter Nine**

Standing on Zeora's roof on a clear fall day, Silthri looked out over the City. She had lived in and loved this City for nearly twenty years, traded in it, married in it, borne and buried children in it. But now one of her children had been cast out of it, and that put a wound in her heart that was refusing to heal. For the first time since Dexias had died, and far more seriously this time, Silthri considered leaving Lillun.

Zeora sat beside her, warm and rounded and placid, combing the hair of one of her young daughters. "I miss Amnao, too," she said soothingly, "but I have other children here, and so do you. You can't fly to the ends of the earth to find Dessi, you know." Finished, she kissed the girl and shooed her back into the house.

"How is Tatha's son?" asked Silthri, her voice pointed. Confused, Zeora replied, "The one who lives with his father? Well, fine and growing last she saw him, but.... Silthri, that is not the same!"

"Yes, it is. She is willing to work to see her son, every time; the least I can do for my daughter is to be willing to search for her. I see her face everywhere in the City, though she is not here."

Zeora opened her mouth, but what emerged was, "Hullo, Zaton!" as he appeared over the rooftops. "Hullo, Zeora, hullo, Silthri!" Zaton called, dancing up to them to kiss Zeora on her cheek and embrace Silthri, who laughed and wiggled free. "You should kiss me, Silthri," he said cheerfully. "I have news of the exiles!"

"What?!" Silthri flung herself on Zaton. "Tell me, tell me!"

"All right!" Zaton held her steady. "They went to the Town of Shells, Hadith, and then down the coast. A trader from Hadith told me, down in the Trading Place, that they went to the Copper Island, and from there across the sea."

"How does he know?" Silthri demanded, shaking Zaton in her fervor. "Does he know if they went further? Does he know if they reached the Big Island?"

"He knows because they were the talk of the Copper Island. They had a powerful old priestess with them, everyone said, and a man who could make something useful out of anything. The Copper Island traders told the people of Hadith, that's how the traders know. But no one knows if they reached the Big Island. I think they did, though."

"But you don't know!" Silthri's eyes filled with tears of frustration. "No one knows what happened to our friends, our daughters!"

Zeora laid her hand on Silthri's arm. "They are our children, Silthri. If they had died we would know in our hearts." Silthri opened her mouth, then bowed her head and nodded. Dessi was still alive in her heart. She had to believe that.

  
*

  
The last person Silthri had expected to agree with her that she should leave Lillun was Orani, but that was exactly who did, and told her how and where she might go. "You don't want to leave forever," said Orani, propped up in the bed that it was increasingly unlikely she would ever leave. "You just need a change for a bit. What you should do is go on a trading trip."

"A trading trip?" Silthri asked as she brought a bowl of frumenty across from the hearth; Orani teased her, "no dates?" to make Silthri laugh, then went on. "Yes, a trading trip. Long enough for you to stop seeing your lost children everywhere, short enough for you not to pine away for home."

"But women don't go on trading trips---"

"---Lest they have children on the way, or are stolen. Are you having any more children, Silthri?" Orani gently poked Silthri in her belly, and Silthri laughed again, shaking her head. "You are still beautiful, my sister, but you are not so young. If you go with a large party, I doubt you will be stolen."

"Depending; if the thief is handsome enough maybe I'll let him carry me off." Silthri winked, and Orani laughed and licked off a fingerful of frumenty. "Still.... thank you, Orani. I think a trading trip may be just what I need. Now to see if I can convince the men to let me go!"

  
*

  
Predictably, the men preparing to go on the next trip did not like the idea. "But women never go on trading trips!" they cried. Eligo's son Dinaf snidely said, "trying to retrace your youth?", and Silthri turned her head to glare at him. "I want to go trade outside the City, I am not having my moon-days, and I will bring you good luck. Dexias always said I brought him good luck."

"Dexias isn't here," pointed out another man, but a third shushed him. "That was not her doing," he said. "She's not pregnant or bleeding; why should she not come with us?"

"As long as we don't end up carrying her back," said Dinaf. Silthri tried hard not to judge children by their parents, but she thought she had enough evidence to judge Dinaf obnoxious all on his own; she put her hands on her hips and tossed her head back, replying "I hope I don't end up carrying _you_ , young man," which made him turn crimson and the other men guffaw.

So it was decided. Silthri gave her house, and her two younger daughters, over to Siano and Deonas; when she started to say, "If I don't return," Siano shook her head fiercely and clutched her mother. "You _will_ return. You will." She went to see Orani, who kissed her and blessed her; Ziin, who had been standing awkwardly in the kitchen, emerged to bow to her and bless her, and, not wanting to leave on such strained terms, but still unable to embrace him, Silthri went to him and squeezed his hands. Zeora kissed Silthri also, and fussed over her, and gave her a drink of milk to strengthen and sustain her.

Having said her goodbyes and washed her hair, dressed in a sturdy hide dress and hooded cape, Silthri shouldered her pack and walked out at dawn to the Trading Place. The other men were there, all eight of them, and then a ninth came running up; he was Zaton, Silthri saw with surprise. "So that's why I could not find you to bid you farewell!" she said as she took his hand. "Are you coming as well?"

"Someone needs to look after you," he said with a wink, and she thought of being angry with him, but the anger dissolved in gratitude and relief that she would have a friend with her on this journey. As they set out, the low pink sun making their shadows long, she kept her hand in his.

  
*

  
"I think I had forgotten how far we walked each day," Silthri said in a low voice to Zaton as she rubbed her feet. He nodded with sympathy and rue, rubbing his own. "Let us trade rubbing," he said slyly. "Our feet will feel better under each other's fingers." Silthri tried it, and soon began to laugh.

Dinaf wandered by. "Do your feet hurt?" he asked in an overly sweetened voice. Silthri looked up at him. "I am fine, and I thank you for your concern."

"It's not too late to limp back," he added, and she considered saying something pointed, but he wandered off again when she didn't respond. "I think I am going to be tired of him very soon," she said to Zaton, who nodded. "I think I am tired of him already."

The walking was harder the next day, but Silthri kept her head up and kept putting her feet one before the other; and on the third day it was easier again. Indeed, the trip was pleasant in the warm early autumn; she felt some of what she had that year when she had gathered for her living, wandering alone in the grasslands and groves, away from the realm of people, immersed in the realm of and spirits of nature. Of course she was not alone now, what with nine men for company, but the one she walked with was Zaton, who looked around with a keen and wondering eye, just catching the spirits as they flitted out of sight, storing up the deer and the trees and the sunshine in his mind for when he next painted. Silthri wondered, as she held her hand out to butterflies or tucked flowers in her hair, what her daughter Sintha would see around them, Sintha who was half a spirit herself, who had told Silthri just before she left that "Papa said to tell you he loves you, and that Dessi is hunting well," as ordinarily if relaying a message from Zeora or Orani.

At nights, lying on grass or a sandy cave floor, wrapped in her cloak and snuggled with Zaton, Silthri would think of her trip with Dexias, and before that of the now-distant journey with her stepmother; she would think of Oran, Dessi, Enaf and her lost babies, and sometimes she would cry quietly and Zaton would lean over her to kiss the tears off her cheeks. She was glad even of that part of the trip; the tears were healing tears, and when Zaton would kiss her she would smile and turn and kiss him back.

Sometimes when the party stopped for a rest Silthri and Zaton would wander off and return a little while later breathless and smiling with pink ears. Everyone else grinned but said nothing, even Dinaf; Silthri held words of gentle refusal at the ready in case any of the other men paid court to her, but none of them asked, which was a relief. Zaton's friendship and embrace were wonderful to have on the trip, but he had been unexpected, and she was seeking no other such friends.

On the third day they came to Tenulli, the first stop of three. Silthri recognized the headwoman Runilli from her trip with Dexias; she had the same hawk nose and wing brows of her father, and his same generous nature. When the day's trading was done, and Silthri was binding her furs and horn into a neat bundle to strap to her pack, Runilli came back to their camp. "I have seen you before," she said to Silthri curiously, and Silthri smiled and nodded. "Nearly twenty years ago when I was a maiden, I came by here with my husband."

"I would hope he is well," said Runilli politely, but with the curiosity showing through, and Silthri ruefully shook her head, then smiled again to ease her sad news. "Our children are well, though, and our younger daughter still has the necklace I was given by your father." That much was true, though Dessi and her necklace were painfully far away; Silthri kept the smile on her face with an effort.

The effort was worthwhile; Runilli looked delighted. "Then you may wear this one in its place," she said with cheer, holding out a lovely necklace, its center an antler section inscribed with a spiral, its other beads white baked clay and gleaming bone sections and carefully spaced teeth. Silthri took it and gasped. "You do me too much honor," she said, bowing low, smiling like a delighted child; turning to her pack she pulled out the largest of the five mirrors she had brought, and gave it to Runilli, who cried out upon seeing her face in the shining obsidian. Runilli embraced Silthri in strong arms and bowed to her and went back into the village, still looking into the mirror, just as Zaton came over to Silthri. "What was that about?"

"She remembered me!" Silthri cried, delighted and amazed. "And she gave me this! So I gave her my best mirror. It was what little I could do."

Zaton lifted the necklace over Silthri's head and pulled her braid free. "It fits you. Of course she remembered you. I would remember such a beauty coming by my village." Silthri laughed and shook her head, but Zaton silenced any self-deprecating words by kissing her.

*

Following the curve of the Mountains, the party walked on for five more days through thickening woods to Lillinah, the City of the Foothills, whose hunters pursued mountain sheep, bears, and even wolves up into the Mountains. It was a fine place to trade obsidian, and to trade for furs.

It also had three streams deep enough to take a bath. Silthri asked the friendliest-looking woman in the greeting party if and where she might bathe, and, being directed to a good place, took Zaton with her. He teased her about wanting company, but he unbraided her hair for her so she could rinse it, while she took off her necklaces and armlets and anklets and stowed them in her pack, and he made appreciative howling noises when she stepped out of her dress.

Silthri laughed at him and ducked her head to rinse out her hair, standing on pebbles in the knee-deep water; she wound her wet hair atop her head and sat down to wash the rest of herself, and just as she was done a shadow fell over her. She looked up and found an unfamiliar young man standing over her, wearing a kilt of felted wool and a small moustache, broad-shouldered and smiling and green-eyed. Perhaps not quite so young, she amended her thought as he stood there, smiling, and she held his gaze, trying as best as a naked woman in a stream could to not look vulnerable. He was missing a tooth, but the rest looked healthy, and she was missing a couple herself at that, after all her pregnancies.

"I didn't think our streams were large enough for river-spirits," he finally said, in a low-pitched, warm voice with the burr of the Lillinah accent. Silthri smiled, though she did not move. "I am just a woman," she said. "I am with---- I am one of the traders from Lillun. I could meet you properly, once I am dressed," she went on, trying to put enough of an edge to her voice that he would catch her hint, without sounding unfriendly. Wherever Zaton was, his was doubtless close enough to hear if she screamed, but still.

The young man smiled more widely and gave her his hand. "I am Anien," he said as he helped her out of the stream; she put on her dress and tied her girdle again, wondering all the while where Zaton and her pack were. "Would you like a meal?" he offered, holding out his hand to her again. "It's past midday."

"I should probably return to my party," said Silthri, attracted to and unnerved by this young man in equal measure. Water ran out of her hair and dripped off her ears; he caught a drop with his free hand, licked it off his finger, and smiled at her even more widely. "Would you like to dry your hair?" he asked.

Silthri looked at Anien, trying to see him as he really was, trying to see his intent. If she went with him no one would know where she was; however, any settlement who harmed a trader knew the curses of their gods and the anger of the trader's people that would fall on them. Besides, he didn't look as if he wanted to _harm_ her.... "It could use combing, too, I think," said Silthri, making her decision, as she walked off with him into Lillinah.

*

Anien's house was over on the other side of the little city. Lillinah was much smaller than Lillun, perhaps a handful more than an hundred houses; they had a wide field of wheat, but that was their only crop, so Silthri was glad she had brought a small sack of the large cultivated peas of Lillun with her. The houses of Lillinah were whitewashed and square, packed in groups with winding shadowed lanes between them, two main ones and a few connecting paths too narrow for people to walk more than single file. Anien led Silthri through the lanes and down a narrow path to his house, painted over the doorway with a red deer with a negative handprint on its stomach, and hung with drying hides; when they stepped inside no one was there except a baby asleep in a cradle, and more hides and furs hung on a thorn-wood framework over the larger and smokier of the two hearths.

Silthri went over to admire the baby. "What an adorable child. Is it your baby?" Anien nodded, his ever-present smile looking sadder. "My daughter Tanea, named for her mother, who died giving birth to her last winter. I live here with my sister and her husband, who are doubtless trading with your fellows, and the two little demons they call children." He grinned, and she couldn't help but grin back. "I have four children living," Silthri told him, "and a grandchild on the way. I would have another child and a grandchild, but a coughing plague struck Lillun this past winter and killed them and my husband and many others from our city."

Anien nodded sympathetically, and handed Silthri a wooden cup of broth from the pot on the smaller hearth. She blew on it and sipped it; it had an unfamiliar, rich, musky flavor. "What meat is this?" she asked, and he smiled mischievously as he told her, "bear." Silthri considered that ---after all, hunting bears for their furs would yield bear meat ----and decided she liked it. Anien gave her wheat bread to dip, and they ate a companionable meal, talking about their families. Silthri found herself even telling him about Dessi's exile; Anien reached over to take her hand, and his hand on hers felt as natural as if they'd known each other for years.

When they were done eating and the cups were rinsed, Silthri went to the doorway, unwound her hair, and shook it out. "May I borrow a comb?" she asked Anien, who brought her a comb and laid his hand on her shoulder. "May I comb your hair?" he asked.

Silthri looked over her shoulder at him. "What do you want from me, Anien?" she asked. "Before you can comb my hair I need to know that."

"I want to lie with you, Silthri," he said, his voice so low it was almost a growl, his words making her blood run hot despite her efforts at caution. "You are beautiful, and you are ---you are not from here. Every woman in this city still reminds me of Tanea, every face echoes her face. You do not. Your face is your own."

Silthri nodded, and smiled, the uncertainty in her stomach unraveling and dissolving. "I left Lillun because everywhere I saw my lost children. I know what you feel." She leaned back, her wet head on his shoulder. "Comb my hair, then," she said, and he smiled and kissed her.

  
*

  
Silthri walked back to the traders' camp, a fine bearskin in a large bundle beneath her arm, her afternoon running back through her head, those green eyes glowing in her memory. Anien had braided her hair and pinned it with a finial carved from antler, then unbound her girdle and lifted her dress up over her head. His hands and mouth on her body certainly felt as if he had lain alone for the better part of the year; he peaked twice, the first time with a vigorous urgency, the second only after cheekily deciding to see if he could make Silthri forget his baby daughter and scream, which he nearly did, earning a love bite for his efforts. Silthri remembered that and laughed quietly, delightedly to herself. Tanea had mercifully slept even through that, but she woke them from their nap; Silthri went to the baby and Tanea took to her, smiling and stretching out her little arms. Anien had chewed up a bit of bread and wet it with broth, and they fed Tanea and played with her before Silthri put on her dress and kissed Tanea and Anien, making to leave, but Anien stopped her. Letting his daughter play on a bed platform, Anien had rolled up his largest fur and given it to Silthri; she blushed, and ran her fingers over the bite on his shoulder, and blushed more deeply at his smile; having no words, she kissed him warmly one last time, and went. As she set out, Silthri worried that she might be lost, but Lillinah was not very big, so soon she came out near the stream, and from there it was just a short walk to Lillinah's Trading Place.

Perhaps twenty of the people of Lillinah were still there, holding bundles of furs and strings of teeth, picking over the obsidian, shells, and grains, but Zaton rose, leaving the carven sheep he was displaying in the hands of the woman examining it, and ran over to Silthri. "Where have you been?" he hissed, his eyes like flint, and she realized with surprise that for the first time since she had met him he was cross with her. "I have been worried about you!"

"I made a friend, who fed me and gave me this," she said, showing him the fur. He narrowed his eyes and said, "I think I can guess what you traded!"

That was quite enough. Silthri was not going to let anyone, not even Zaton, wreck the warm pleasure of her afternoon. "You are not my husband, Zaton; I do not have to ask your leave." She started to turn away, but he laid a hand on her arm, and when she looked at him he was hanging his head. "You are right," he said. "And I am sorry. I just, I took your pack back to our camp, and when I returned you were gone. Before we could look for you people began to arrive to trade, and Dinaf, that weevil, said that if they gave us some furs the people of Lillinah could keep you. I didn't know what I would tell Orani, tell your daughters, if I came back without you."

"I don't think Lillinah needs to steal one woman who's likely done bearing children," said Silthri cheerfully. ""It's all right. I am glad that you care for me, Zaton." Silthri laid her hand on his hand and squeezed it, and he smiled.

  
*

  
Five days later, as Silthri walked behind Zaton through the tall grass, she thought over something that had been bothering her since they had left Lillinah, some idea in the back of her head that had not yet emerged in its final form. Looking around at the grass she wondered what would happen if it caught a disease; after all, plants caught diseases just as animals and people did. What if the grass caught a plague? What if wheat caught a plague? If its luck turned, if a malicious spirit struck it or it angered one of its deities, a small city such as Lillinah might lose its whole crop.

"There it is!" called Zanef, walking in the lead, and she laid aside her thoughts to hurry after the men. The village of Itanjani lay in sight, the village that had been built on the land taken from the Janicai. Perhaps twenty-odd of the young men sent to hold it had stayed, building rectangular houses in two groups on either side of a village street, bringing families from Lillun or marrying women from the neighboring tribes. One of those young men was Enas, who came out to greet the party of traders. "Silthri! Zaton!" Enas rushed forward to embrace his friends in his strong arms; if anything, he was burlier than his father had been.

Silthri looked up at him, delighted to see him. "How are you?" they asked each other at once, and laughed; Enas answered first. "I am well, I am well. I don't have to build all the time here; I'm also a farmer; we have a patch of wheat and a patch of barley on the West Slope there, and peas and vetches on the north side of the village, on the stream banks. My wife's people gave us these odd little nubbly peas, they look sort of like tiny acorns, they're grainy but filling. They call them chickpeas."

"Your wife? Who cares about peas, my friend! Tell me about your family!" Zaton pretended to punch him, and Enas roared with laughter. "I married a woman from the Oakchildren, her name is Ailde, and we have three living children, and you must come meet them!" So Silthri and Zaton went off to have dinner with Enas and sleep in his house, the largest in the village.

  
*

  
A warm clay kettle of pottage, mixed-grain with onions by its smell, bubbled on the hearth, scenting the house from their first step over the threshold. Enas' wife was a rounded woman of middle height with a generous smile and brown wavy hair wound around her head, who greeted them graciously and dropped a bird into the pottage to fill out the meal. At Ailde's invitation, Silthri sat beside her, admiring her dress, which had been striped by using two different colors of wool in the weft, gray and tan. Basking in the warmth of the hearth, chatting with Ailde about children as they watched the three children climb on Zaton and their father, Silthri thought of how, although she had enjoyed the trip, it was very nice to relax in an actual home, and how nice it would be to sleep on a bed platform rather than the ground.

"So, Silthri, what brings you out trading?" Enas asked, dangling his daughter upside down from one arm. "It's not usual that a woman goes out trading with the men."

Silthri smiled ruefully. "It's a sad story." Enas looked puzzled, but Ailde put her hand on his leg, shaking her head. "There was a plague in Lillun last winter, remember, the last group of traders said? I don't think we need to ask more." Silthri smiled gratefully at Ailde, who smiled back as she served up a cup of pottage with a piece of the stewed bird.

Soon enough, after a sociable evening, Silthri and Zaton lay together in the darkened nighttime house, listening to Enas snore and his family sleep on the other platform. Silthri found herself unable to sleep; in fact she felt hot all over, the moonlight calling to her. "Are you still awake?" she whispered; Zaton nodded against her shoulder, and she giggled and poked him a few times, and he started to wriggle out of the bed. Silthri followed him, and, giggling like adolescents, their hands to their mouths, they carefully tiptoed out of the house and into the middle of the sleeping village.

Silthri stretched her arms to the moon, nearly at its fullest, its light pouring down into her. Zaton kissed the back of her neck, and she giggled and turned to him. They were both naked for sleeping, and he was certainly awake; feeling him warm against her cool skin, she realized she was too. "We can't stand here, in the middle of the village," she whispered between kisses; his response was to pull her over against the wall of a house, and she laughed, pressing her fingers to her mouth. "Won't we wake them?"

"Shhh, they should be so lucky as to hear such music." Zaton kissed her, and she laughed into the kiss as she returned it, wrapping her limbs around him, the whitewashed wall of the house smooth against her back.

Afterwards Silthri sat on the grass beside the house, Zaton's head in her lap. It was a little chilly to be outside naked, but neither of them quite wanted to go inside yet, to leave the moonlight. "Were you really jealous of me, back at Lillinah?" she asked, running her fingers through his hair; he nodded, smiling ruefully. "I'm sorry," he whispered, curling himself more closely around her. "It was just that, thinking of never seeing you again, that was not pleasant, not at all. So when you returned, I was so relieved I was angry. You have children, you know how it is."

Silthri smiled, stroking his hair, thinking on how one could know a man for years and suddenly learn who he really was in a few unusual days. "I am glad you came on this trading trip, Zaton. It has been so much better for me that you're here." He smiled at that, his teeth shining in the moonlight, the gap lending as ever that rakish air; then he shivered and stood, pulling her to her feet after him. "I think you're coming out in goosebunps. Come on, let's get back into a warm bed."

*

Silthri had not known she could carry such a bundle of furs, but she was certainly not going to quail before Dinaf. Bent nearly double, she hauled her overstuffed pack, with all the bundles tied to it, back into Lillun. At the Trading Place the men split up to go to their individual homes; Zaton squeezed her hand and staggered off beneath his own bundle, and she watched him walk away for as long as her screaming back would let her, missing him oddly. Halfway to home Deonas saw Silthri, and ran to help her; gratefully she pulled off her pack, stretched out her bent back, and embraced him, and between them they hauled the pack back to her house.

Once she arrived, and had been embraced by her daughters and given water and allowed to sit, she looked around at her home, its familiar strangeness, and her three daughters, sitting by her feet, and her strong son-by-marriage. Her family. Silthri felt her eyes fill with tears, and blinked them back; Orani had been right. The trip had taken her away long enough for her heart to heal, and brought her back to where she belonged.

That night, as she sat at dinner, praising Zeelo as extravagantly as she could for having caught the rabbit they were eating and telling her family about the little cities and the wide skies of her journey, Zaton came by. "Hullo! I thought you would be with your sister!" said Silthri in cheerful surprise, as her daughters waved; Zaton smiled, but he looked oddly serious. "Silthri, can you come up to the roof for a moment?" he asked, and she nodded and rinsed her fingers and did so. "Zaton, what is it?" she asked, beginning to worry at how serious he looked.

"Silthri, I, well." He started pacing, as she looked at him, mystified. "I went on the trading trip just for the pleasure of it, and going with you was a pleasure far above what I expected." Silthri smiled at that compliment, but he wasn't done. "I realized something, though. The day we arrived at Lillinah, when you told me I was not your husband, oh, I am tumbling this all together." Zaton was growing so nervous that Silthri carefully kept her face still, lest he think a smile was laughter, as he closed his blue eyes and opened them again. "When I was fourteen, I was too young to marry, and so was Anio, but we did. Since she died, and the baby with her, I never thought to marry again. Elthin took well to muralling, Galo forms statuettes beautifully, and their brother carves with their father. I didn't need to have children of my own to pass on my crafts, so I thought since I had no need of children and I have friends, I had no need to marry. That was, till I found a woman to marry. A woman I must marry."

'After all this time?' The words danced on Silthri's tongue so that she had to keep her mouth shut tight. Her mind muttered that he couldn't mean what her soul was singing to her that he meant. Silthri pushed her whirling thoughts away, any thought would shatter her composure; she merely nodded, but that small response encouraged Zaton enough for him to stop pacing. He stood there in the moonlight, his hands clasped, his blue eyes shining, and said, "Silthri, will you marry me?"

Silthri's mind ceased whirling, settled to one clear thought. She let out a long, long, happy breath, realizing that she was trembling. "Yes," Silthri whispered, holding out her hands to him. "Yes." He squeezed her hands in his, his eyes like twin moons. "Yes, Zaton, I will marry you."  



	10. Dawn City, Chapter Ten

  
**Chapter Ten**.

Silthri stood looking down at Dexias' bones. They were still mostly submerged in soil, for when they had buried him they had dug deeply, but she was sure that that copper-green armband wound around an upper arm-bone had been the shining one he'd worn when they had buried him. Beside him and a little above lay Orani. curled on her side, finally looking peaceful instead of in pain.

It was nearly springtime, it was nearly dusk. Silthri stood between Deonas and Zaton, her young daughters standing before her, Ziin before them holding baby Ena in one arm as with the other hand he threw in the first handful of earth. Isti stood at the foot of the bed platform, her hands on Rani and Oran's shoulders, singing in her sweet high voice.

Silthri went up with her daughters to throw in their handfuls, and as she did she looked down into Orani's gaunt, pale face, remembering her as she had first met her, sparkling-eyed and full-breasted and full of life. She'd had a good full life, Silthri told herself. As Ziin and Deonas lifted their auroch's shoulder-blade shovels, Silthri took up the song, singing Orani's goodness to an orphan girl, her generosity, her sharp mind and tongue, her strength. Isti and Silthri sang to Orani until the platform was filled in and raised a little and smoothed flat. In half a month Ziin and Isti would return to coat it, and the entire house, with white plaster; in forty days Silthri might come stay with them for a night and sleep once more between Dexias and Orani. They all pressed handprints to the wall, handprints which Zaton or his nephew might paint red and yellow in a month while muralling the walls.

The finality was too heavy even for tears. Silthri rinsed her hands in the basket of water by the ladder, picked up her cloak, and climbed to the roof to sit; Sintha followed her and laid her head on Silthri's knee, and Zaton sat beside her and put his arm around her, and they sat together on the roof, looking at the three spiral-palmed handprints, at the sky beyond, at nothing at all.

Silthri looked up to see Ziin coming to her, still a bit diffident, obviously trying to find the words he wanted. She held her hands out to him, and when he took her hands she pulled herself to her feet and embraced him. "Life begins and it ends," she said, her hands on his shoulders. "You are my sister's son, Ziin. I will always care for you." Ziin smiled one of his rare smiles, his eyes wet, and embraced Silthri so tightly she could feel her ribs almost cracking, feel the heaviness in her heart being squeezed out. He let go of her and went back to his wife, and Silthri sat down again with her husband and her daughter, putting her arms around them, comforted by her family.

*

Silthri sat beside Enafon, Zeora's husband, eating roasted baby lamb and politely listening to him talk and talk and talk about his grand plans for his patches of land. It was full springtime now, and everyone's homes shone with their new plaster and whitewash, so the City was full of celebration. Silthri could think of better ways to celebrate than listening to Enafon go on and on, but an evening meal in company was still a pleasure, and Zeora was quite fond of her husband, so Silthri reminded herself to nod, chew, and smile.

"And I think I will take out the barley," Enafon went on, and Silthri swallowed her mouthful. "I think wheat tastes better, and people will trade more for it."

"What if something happens to the wheat?" Silthri heard herself saying, and was shocked at herself. What did she know about farming? Enafon blinked, and narrowed his eyes, and Silthri was afraid that he was angered, but he tilted his head and she realized that he was thinking about her words. "Perhaps you have a point," he said slowly. "Maybe I'll leave in some barley on the north side, and..." he was off again on his plans, but he did seem to have heard her… though why she said it Silthri did not know.

Silthri's musings and Enafon's monologue were interrupted when Deonas stuck his head through the trapdoor and waved his hand. "Mistress Zeora, may I borrow Mother Silthri from you for a moment?" Zeora nodded her assent, and Silthri licked her fingers clean and climbed up to talk to him. "Deonas, what is it?"

"Siano and Gana fought again," he said wearily, and Silthri sighed, shaking her head. Amnef's new wife thought that as the elder woman she ought to run their house. Silthri thought that her daughter was the better housewife, but she did allow that she might be biased; still, Gana would not listen to Siano at all, treating her like a child and criticizing how she cared for Dessin. "We have a bed that no one sleeps on," Silthri pointed out, for what felt to be the hundredth time, and graciously did not add "as I have offered before.".

Perhaps it was the hundredth stalk that filled the pail. Deonas nodded. "We should never have moved back after you returned. I like the light there better for my work, and your house is larger as well. Thank you, Mother Silthri!" Deonas squeezed her and bounded away, and Silthri, shaking her head and smiling, climbed down to tell Zeora the story.

  
*

As Zeora later told Silthri, the Mother must have breathed in Silthri's ear. That summer it rained very little, and the River ran low; the wheat mostly dried up and died, but the barley held fast. Enafon and the other farmers who had kept growing barley had grain to spare, while the farmers who had grown only wheat had nothing for their labor. Eligo was one of them; Silthri heard her wailing loudly to a friend, down by the Acorn Ford, and allowed herself one hidden smile.

The disaster, following just the next year after the plague, made a still-recovering City tremble in fear of new wounds; everyone worried to each other as they ate together, as they traded, as they bathed and washed clothes and acorns down by the River. Was Lillun cursed? Had its luck turned, its magic gone sour?

Silthri was normally a quiet woman, but the sound of people losing faith in the City she had come to love started to irritate her. "Nonsense," she began to say, first to her family, then down in the Trading Place and by the Riverbanks, when people worried to her. "People are born, people die. When many people died, we reacted like angry children, we blamed other people and drove them out. The gods and goddesses are merely reminding us that people and creatures and plants die, scolding us as one would send a child to bed without supper." After all, no one could tell her she had not lost in the plague; she still missed Oran, just as she still missed Dexias, and she missed Enaf, her cheerful boy. However, sending Dessi away had not brought Oran and Enaf back to her, had not brought Siano back her baby or Orani back her health, so Silthri finally began to say what she had longed to for over a year.

Surprisingly, this did not make her enemies. People seemed to listen, and to calm down, to be comforted. "You're gaining a reputation for wisdom," Zaton said to her one night in bed, which made her stare at him as if he had declared he were a fish. "Me, Zaton? I'm just a woman, raising her children and trading in the City. Are you sure you don't mean some other wife?" She winked at him, and he laughed. "No, I mean you," he persisted. "People ask me what you would think of this or that, and I tell them to go ask you themselves."

Zaton smiled at the wonder on her face and closed his eyes; Silthri laid her head on his shoulder and thought of Enitheris, who had seemed the wisest woman in the world when Silthri was a child. Perhaps she had reached down and touched Silthri in her middle years. "Thank you, Stepmother," she thought. "Thank you."

*

  
Silthri certainly needed all the wisdom she could summon, when Tatha came to her in tears, seeking her aid. "Olthas is dying!" she wept; quite confused, Silthri embraced her while she cried herself out. Since Tatha had left Olthas, their love for each other had burnt down to ashy civility, not least when he demanded their son as soon as Zeon was weaned. Silthri bore him little love herself since he had exiled her daughter for no more reason than a vague connexion to his enemy, exiled friends of hers for the same ludicrous reason; she held the weeping Tatha and thought of what she could say to Isti that would not sound too much like false sympathy.

Finally Tatha wept herself out and sat up again, and Silthri carefully said, "I am sorry for your grief;" Tatha blinked at that, then began to laugh, her usual liveliness shining through. "Oh! Oh, no, I am not weeping for that--- for my former husband! You're too good, Silthri, trying to comfort me, when I came to you because I know you have the same reason to hate him as I do." Tatha threw her head back and laughed to the edge of hysteria before sobering; when she looked at Silthri again she was saner, but still wet-eyed. "Thano won't let me see Zeon," Tatha continued, sad again, holding onto Silthri as if she might fall without the older woman's arms. "Olthas would at least let me see my son, but since he fell ill, Thano won't even let me enter their house, she keeps Zeon inside all the time... oh, Silthri, what will I do to see my child?"

Silthri shook her head, her heart aching for Tatha. Having a child out of reach, she knew how that hurt. "Orani's son is married to Olthas' daughter Isti; she's a warm-hearted girl. I'm sure she can help you see your son." Tatha glowed at this hope and embraced Silthri nearly tightly enough to break her arm, before running off again.

*

  
As it turned out, Isti came to Silthri three days later, as Silthri sat on her rooftop shelling and skinning acorns. "My father is dead," she said simply; Silthri embraced her, and found to her surprise that she meant it, that her "I am sorry" reflected the truth of her heart.

Isti embraced Silthri warmly, then sat back, taking up a handful of acorns to help with the skinning, dry-eyed. "He was wasting away, he was in pain; it's like it was with Orani, a relief to see him no longer hurting. Besides, Thano is crazy, she's so afraid she's crazed. She won't even let Zeon or Iltha out of the house, she thinks my father was struck down by the Evil Eye of one of his 'enemies'. Father wouldn't have _had_ enemies if he hadn't exiled Priestess Tirano and a hundred people with her; did he think he could heal one wound by inflicting another? But you know that better than I do." Isti smiled ruefully at Silthri, who smiled and patted her hand. "Now she is doing what he did, keeping a child from his mother, and I don't know how to help my brother, or my sister."

Silthri fervently, silently blessed Whomever had looked over her shoulder and whispered in Isti's ear for her. "I wonder, a new widow with no time to trade and no grown children in her house... do you think Thano could use anything right now, some meat or grain or fruit?"

"Besides some sense? Her quern is cracked, and she hasn't gotten a new one yet, she's been too busy caring for Father and acting crazy."

Silthri nodded with satisfaction. "I think that between you, me, and Tatha, if you'll help us, we can get Zeon out into the sunlight again, and Iltha, too."

*

Tatha and Isti came the very next day, Zeon and Iltha in tow, to kiss Silthri with gratitude; while Isti made a meal for them all Tatha told the story with excitement, carrying her son as she danced around Silthri's house. Isti had helped Tatha bring the quern to Olthas' house, which Thano was refusing to leave despite the forty days; her brother arrived just as they did, and beset by the three of them, Thano had broken down entirely and been carried away by her brother. Tatha and Isti put the house together for its forty days of emptiness, bid Olthas goodbye, and took the children with them; now Zeon clung to his mother's arms or skirt, a bemused smile on his face, and Iltha, too little to understand the situation, prattled to her half-sister in her baby voice and danced around Silthri's house with Tatha.

However, the two young women also brought disturbing news. Silon the stone-grinder, when trading with Tatha for the quern, told her that a party of traders had arrived from Lillinah, looking thin, saying that their wheat had died and so Lillinah desperately needed food from Lillun. Silthri pressed her hand to her mouth upon hearing that, feeling the blood draining from her face, and Tatha gasped at her reaction, leaning forward to put her arm around Silthri's shoulders. "Is that where you are from?"

"No, no." Hearing Tatha's words as if from a great distance, Silthri shook her head, her mind full of Anien's green eyes and broad smile, baby Tanea's plump limbs. How did they fare? "No, I came from a small village. It's just that when I went trading last fall, we went to Lillinah, and I made, I made a friend there, a friend with a baby. I'm worried for them." Tatha nodded, then looked up as a youth stuck his head through the trapdoor. "Mistress Silthri?" he called.

"Come in," Silthri called to the boy, who climbed down and bowed. "Can you come with me?"

Silthri stood and dusted off her skirt. "Yes, but where?" The boy smiled, both shyly and slyly, and said, "that has to be a secret till we arrive."

First the weighty news from Lillinah, now this; the day was too full, stuffed to bursting. Silthri felt suddenly weary, but forced herself to smile. "Isti, Tatha, can one of you stay here until my husband or any of my children return? Let them know I went--- out, I suppose. There's not much more to say." Tatha nodded, and Silthri climbed up after the boy to find out where they were bound.

*

Silthri climbed down through the entrance to her home as quietly as she could, setting her feet down carefully so that the rungs of the ladder would not squeak. By the dim light of the hearth she picked her way carefully over to her bed; all her family were in their beds, breathing softly, and she thought they were all asleep until, as she slipped into bed beside him, Zaton pinched her rump. "So, where have you been, my mysterious wife?" he whispered merrily.

Laughing silently, Silthri tapped him on the nose. "The elders called me to meet with them, o my curious husband," she whispered back, and was about to continue when Siano called softly, "the elders?"

"Shouldn't you be asleep?" Silthri called back. Siano laughed softly and crept over to sit beside her mother. "My boys are asleep; I just nursed Dessin back to sleep and laid him in his father's arms. So, what did the elders want with you, Mother?"

"Envoys have come from Lillinah," responded Silthri, sitting up to put her head beside Siano's and whisper to her and Zaton. "Not just traders, but one of their elders. They have very little food, they said; their oaks are having a lean year, as well as the wheat dying. So they went to Itanjani, but such a small village didn't have enough food to spare, so they came to us. Most of the men whom I went with on my trip are away, so the elders called me to ask me about the city. I don't know why they were so mysterious about their summons, since they simply asked me what my trip there was like and what I thought of Lillinah's resources. I told them that the people of Lillinah had shown me ---had shown all of us--- great hospitality." Zaton snorted at that; Silthri pinched him gently and went on. "I told them that Lillinah is our sister city from long ago, and that I think we should be gracious and generous. They told me that they were sending a party of traders down to Lillinah with the envoys."

"Why don't you go?" asked Zaton. "You have been before; you could take Deonas' obsidian knives and perhaps a few beads I've made. Maybe you'll come back with another bundle of furs." More softly he breathed in her ear, "If you wanted to see your friend again, you have my leave."

Silthri squeezed Zaton's hand and took a deep breath. "I wish I could. I think I could do well if I took some of your magnificent stone beads; you learned well from Amnef. However, I was going to tell you my news in the morning, my nosy family, but since you insist on being awake now, give me your hands." When they did, Silthri laid them on her belly. "Can you feel it?"

Siano gasped, and squeaked, her hand pressed against her mouth to keep her from waking the rest of the family. "Mama, you've caught another child!" She wrapped her arms around her mother and kissed her warmly.

Zaton's eyes were so huge they shone even in the dimness. "We thought---"

"We thought I was done bearing children. I thought my moon-days had simply left. But today, I realized I've been feeling what I thought I would never feel again. I realized I've felt the child dancing within me." Silthri kissed Zaton. "You are going to be a father, my husband."

Zaton grinned at that, and shook his head. "I already am," he said, and Siano put one arm around him and one around her mother as they all three embraced each other.

  
*

The elders listened to Silthri, to an extent. The traders from Lillun departed with various dry seeds, last spring's acorns and barley, peas and vetches, but when they returned they brought back not only furs and sinews and horns and bones, but also thirty children. Silthri happened to be down by the River treading her wash when the traders returned, each leading two children; she gasped and stood up to watch them, not believing that they had sold their food so expensively, and nearly lost a wool cloak to the current. These children didn't look the way she must have when she had walked into Lillun, awestruck and eagerly looking towards the future; they looked frightened, their faces streaked with tears, bound together in pairs at the wrists with cording as not even the Janicai children had been. Most of them were from Sintha's age down to about five years old; fear for Anien pierced her heart, but she managed to satisfy herself that none of them were young enough to be Tanea.

Sick at heart, Silthri gathered up her washing and fled home. Deonas and Siano stared at Silthri as she threw down the dripping basket, gathered up her younger daughters in a crushing embrace, and began to weep. "Mama, what is it?" asked Siano, hurrying down into the house to put her arms around Silthri, who leaned on her oldest daughter and wept out what she had seen, the pain she felt for the mothers whose children had been stripped from their arms, the children brought to Lillun as trade goods. It took awhile for Silthri to cry herself out and for Siano and Zeelo to convince their mother to drink water and lie down; Sintha curled up beside her mother, while Siano and Zeelo hung out the wash to dry on the second storey pegged-wall, and as they were finishing with that Zaton came home, looking sad. "I have news your mother will not like," he said to Siano, who shook her head. "She already knows," Deonas told him.

Silthri was in bed with grief all the rest of that day, so she missed seeing what was done with the children from Lillinah; they were traded to families who would adopt them, families who needed the extra hands. When Silthri heard she thought she might weep again, but shook her head and said dully both to herself and Zaton, "We don't need the extra hands, and hopefully if they are adopted the way Orani adopted me and Aine, they will find lives in Lillun as we did." Zaton nodded at that, putting his arm around Silthri. "Likely they are children whose parents couldn't feed them," he added, and Silthri nodded, leaning her head against his chest, feeling sick with sadness all the same.

  
*

Early that winter, Silthri went by Zeora's house to visit her friend, who had taken in one of the children from Lillinah, a girl named Onea. Lowering herself carefully through the trapdoor, for she was getting full with her pregnancy, Silthri saw Zeora sitting by the hearth, surrounded by her children, skewering chunks of a sheep's liver and mushrooms and grilling them while the children swirled to and fro around her. With her thick hair bound up atop her head, broad-breasted, smiling at her children, Silthri was struck by how much Zeora resembled Amthri, and her eyes prickled.

Then Silthri noticed that in all this activity Onea was moving slowly, as if ill. "Zeora, is Onea all right?" Silthri asked her friend as she embraced her. Zeora rolled her massive shoulders as she replied. "She's with child, and has pregnancy sickness."

"With child?" Silthri gasped, shocked. "She is a child! She can't be more than ten! Who did this to her, do you know?"

"Oh, I figure one of the boys," said Zeora, as if describing how many sheep her sons had now. "She says she is happy here, so she must be."

"Did you even ask her?" Silthri looked at Onea, who had sat down by the kitchen wall where it was warm; one of the smaller children pushed her, and she surrendered her place without even attempting a fight. Looking her over more carefully, Silthri noticed that the girl wore a hide dress in good repair, but didn't even have so much jewelry as a single necklace. Zeora looked up at Silthri, looking surprised. "Ask her? If she thought I should know wouldn't she have told me?"

"Zeora, how can you treat her like this? She's a child!"

"She's not _my_ child. I feed her and house her and comb her hair, what else should I do?" Annoyance was starting to break through the surprise on Zeora's face. "Onea!" she called, and the girl dutifully came over like a dog. "Mother Silthri is asking after you. Are you well?"

"Yes, Mother Zeora," whispered Onea, looking at her feet. Silthri reached out to the girl, tilting up her face with a finger and pulling off one of her necklaces to drape it around Onea's neck. "If you feel ill or afraid, I am here to help you," Silthri told Onea, who nodded seriously and went away again, fingering the necklace.

"She's fine, Silthri," said Zeora reprovingly. "I don't see why you are so worried for a child not your own."

Silthri stared at her complacent friend, wanting to shake her. Where was the woman who had helped Silthri against her own brother? "Because she's a child, Zeora! A child without a mother. Someone needs to care for her, and I know you can care for another woman's child, you cared beautifully for mine."

"That was different," came Zeora's answer. "I know _you_." Silthri opened her mouth, then shut it again. Nothing she could say would reach Zeora, and she didn't want to quarrel with her friend, but her heart ached as she looked at Onea. Then an idea came to her. "May I take Onea to see my daughters?"

"Of course," said Zeora absently, pushing the grilled chunks of meat and mushrooms into a bowl and handing it to one of the girls; Silthri smiled and extravagantly complimented one of Zeora's little sons on his handstand, thinking of what she might do for Onea.

*

By the time the Time of Replastering came, Onea spent more than half her days with Silthri's household; she was shy, deferential to women and heartbreakingly afraid of men, but bloomed when she ran around with Silthri's daughters, who protected her from bullies and held her in their arms when she miscarried. Zeora lent Onea to Silthri to help with the spring cleaning, because Silthri was so heavily pregnant; she bore Adea very shortly afterwards, and had an unexpectedly hard time of it. Still, Silthri knew that she couldn't keep the girl out of Zeora's household forever unless she had a place to live where Zeora saw her hands were needed.

Soon after Adea's birth, when Silthri was still abed, Tatha came to visit her. Tatha had moved into the Butterfly House with Zeon, and was delightedly prattling about it to Silthri when her pouty comment about all the work of cleaning and arranging a house by herself sparked a thought in Silthri's mind. "Why don't you have Onea move in with you? She could help you keep house."

Tatha blinked. "I thought that she was going to live with Naffan's family?"

"They hardly need one more child." Tatha nodded at that, having heard what Silthri had given up on saying to Zeora; Silthri waved to Onea, who came, her serious little face lit with a rare smile. "Onea, would you like to live in the Butterfly House?" Onea actually beamed with delight at that; she and Zeon had the rare companionship of timid children, and she had loved the murals of the Butterfly Lady from the first moment she saw them. Looking at Onea's transformed face, Tatha smiled.

"I'll go ask my sister," said Tatha, her smile widening impishly, "but only after that story you promised me." Silthri caught her hand, and the two women grinned at each other.

"Story? Story!" Sintha and Zeelo heard their discussion and ran over, and Siano paced over with Dessin at her breast, more sedately, but just as quickly. Her newest baby at her breast, Silthri looked at her daughters, at Zeon, at Onea, and was glad her heart could not break from too much happiness.

"Long ago," said Silthri in her most mysterious voice, as the children's eyes shone, "long ago, before there was a City here, there was a village, a small village whose people had been given grain by the Mother, and who lived among lumps and spalls of obsidian, and knew the black shining rocks could be useful, but did not know what to do with it or how to make it useful. One bright summer day, the most beautiful maiden of the village was out gathering flowers among the tall grasses, when she parted a clump and found herself facing a young man who knelt before her, a rainbow arcing through his shining black hair. He smiled at her with shining teeth, and told her that he had journeyed far, very far, across mountains and rivers, deserts and the sea, seeking the place where he belonged, and that when he had seen her he knew that he had reached the place where he belonged and found the maiden he was to marry. She reached out a hand to the rainbow in his hair, and it quivered and shone and rose up to arc across the sky; she reached out a hand to take his hand, and when her hand rested in his she knew the truth of his words and she loved him, and he drew her down into the green summer grass to lie with him. When she brought him home that evening, he showed her people how to knap the obsidian into knives, and he married her; they had many children, who married people who knew how to weave, how to carve, how to hunt, how to tend tame animals, all the different sorts of work we do in this City. They named their growing town Lillun, Dawn City, because the young man had walked towards the dawn to find them, and that was the way Lillun came to be."

*

On a bright fall day, Silthri walked back over the roofs from the Butterfly House, Adea playing with her hair and bubbling with baby noises. Tatha lived there with Onea and Zeon, and the children were thriving, though Onea was still wary of men.

She stopped to look at her roof from a little ways away, to look at her family. Zeelo was skinning a rabbit she had caught, while Siano was weaving grey wool on a loom, with Sintha spinning beside her and playing with Dessin. Across the roof from them sat Deonas and Zaton; Zaton had recently begun making stone statuettes, and he rubbed an oblong of stone with scraps of fur and abrasive sand as Deonas polished an obsidian mirror.

Silthri stood, watching her family, her baby chortling into her hair, when she was hailed, and turned to see Thanas of the elders coming towards her; his gray beard twisted into long, tail-like plaits, magnificent necklaces around his neck and animal tails round his wrists, a loincloth of leopard skin wrapped round him, Thanas was an impressive sight, and as he walked up to Silthri her heart caught in her throat. "Elder Thanas," she said, bowing respectfully, and he smiled and gave her his hand. "Mother Silthri," he said warmly. "I have been looking for you. We were very impressed with the advice you gave us concerning Lillinah."

Silthri knew she should have smiled at that, but could not. "I am glad I could help, though I hope the taking of those children from their parents and homes was not inspired by my advice."

Thanas smiled diplomatically. "We can give them good lives in Lillun, and they can give us their hands to help make up for all the hands we lost in the plague. But, be that as it may," he went on, and Silthri bit her lip on further words and listened to him. "You are a woman of wisdom and grace, and we may one day ask you to join our number."

"Me?" Silthri put her free hand to her heart, looking around. There didn't seem to be any other women behind her. "Me, Silthri? But I am not a priestess, nor of the Strong Families; I wasn't even born here."

"That is why we need your voice," said Thanas, and now his smile was almost, perhaps, sad? "We have been rash, we need wisdom. Think about it, Mother Silthri," he said, with a final squeeze to her hand, and walked off.

Silthri turned, her mind spinning with the thought. A voice in the direction of her City? Hers? She was so lost in the thought that Sintha ran right up to her, carrying Dessin on her hip, before she even noticed. "Mama!" called Sintha, and Silthri blinked and leaned down to kiss her daughter. Not so far down, these days. "What are you looking at?"

"The City," said Silthri, and Sintha smiled and took her hand, agreeing, "We live in a beautiful City." Smiling, her arm around her daughter, looking out across their City, Silthri stood in the warm early fall on the roofs of Lillun.  



	11. Dawn City, Epilogue and Thoughts

_**Epilogue**_.

Silthri lay on her final bed; soon she would lie within it. On her aged chest lay her great-grandson, two months old, warm and asleep. Silthri held him, breathing in his sweet baby scent, and lay, her eyes closed, her heart full.

Siano sat by her mother's head, as she had so often; she was an old woman herself now, moving stiffly, her curls rounded with grey, reminiscent of Orani as she warmly and wittily oversaw two of her four living children and their cousins in their bustling about Silthri's house. Dessin's wife Teii was the mother of the baby Silthri held; she sat with her head on Siano's knee, spinning and keeping an eye on her older daughter and the other children as they played together and darted in and out of the kitchen, where Onea presided with her daughter Tathi.

Zeelo swung her strapping self down through the doorway, her tall sons behind her. Tall, black-maned and magnificent, Zeelo had kept hunting even after she became a woman and now was a huntress for the City. Her sons were popular young men, handsome and strong and early to manhood; Silthri sometimes teased Zeelo that she was the strongest grandmother in the City. Now Silthri held out one hand to Zeelo, who took it carefully in her own long, wide one, so reminiscent of her father's that Silthri could almost see Oran flickering behind his daughter.

"It's quite the gathering," said Siano to Zeelo as she kissed her. "I'm glad to see you; I just hope the boys don't bump their heads on the roof." Zeelo laughed at that, then turned to hail Sinthi, who kissed her aunts and set about flirting with her grown cousins. Barely a maiden, more a spirit than ever, Sintha had said that she had caught a child "by the North Wind", and died bearing her daughter without picking a name, so Siano and Silthri had named Sinthi after her mother and raised her with Adea and Siano's children; Sinthi had grown into her name, which meant "Star", into a dazzling little rounded beauty with her mother's silky long brown hair.

"I think we are all here," said Siano. "Mother, are you ready?" Silthri nodded, smiling up at her daughter, and Siano stood, smiling in return, taking Silthri's hand. Silthri opened her eyes to look around the room: at her daughters, strapping Zeelo and warm Siano and handsome young Adea; at Ziin's three children, Oran, Ena, and Dini, solid people of middle years whom Silthri could remember as tiny babies; at her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, from Dessin and Sinthi to the baby in her arms; at Onea and Tathi; and at her husbands flickering behind their daughters and Orani shimmering beside her grandchildren, smiling welcomingly through the thinning curtain between worlds. At all her family.

Siano raised her other arm, and they all began to sing, from the deep voices of the grown men to the piping of the little children, Siano's and Zeelo's alto voices the steady warp that all the other voices wove through. Silthri closed her eyes, relaxing into the music as it surrounded her, their voices wrapping around her, a cloak of harmony, sound and love that warmed her, lifted her and bore her away.

Something brushed her face. Silthri opened her eyes, and the Butterfly Maiden looked down at her from Sintha's face, luminous wings beating slowly, glowing silken hair falling from her head to Silthri's. The Butterfly Maiden smiled, and Silthri felt herself smile, felt herself fall, float, rise into the brightening light.  
*

*

*

*

I still remember fondly the experience of writing 50+K words on one subject, in one month. Worldbuilding is *such* fun. This is more of a lump of fiction centered on one person than an actual rounded and finished novel, but I am not Athena to spring fully-formed from the head of Zeus; hopefully this year I can write an actual novel.

I should also write the sequel that shows what happens to Dessi. You guessed what island they all went to, right? ;)  



	12. Unfinished Epilogue -- Dessi on Crete

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dessi on Crete with her husband.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> his is a sequel to my 2003 NaNoWriMo novel, _Dawn City_. Or, would have been. I wanted to show how Dessi, Dinas, and the rest were flourishing in their little Outpost in the Lush Wilderness on an island that I'd make obvious was Crete (it was colonized right around then). But the story never gelled; a portrait does not a story make, and all I had was the setting. Maybe some other time.

Sling in hand, Dessi narrowed her eyes; a flock of doves whirled up from the trees as Dinas disturbed them, and she slung pebbles at them as she watched them fly. Four fell from the sky before they flew out of range; Dinas picked them up as he walked out of the grove, wringing their necks and putting them into his pouch. "Hail the mighty huntress!" he said cheerfully and helped her to her feet and kissed her, and she giggled at him. "Are those enough, do you think?"

"Yes, I think they are enough," Dinas put his arm round Dessi's waist, squeezing her gently. "Besides, aren't you tired?"

"I'm pregnant, not ill," she retorted, leaning against him nevertheless. "I don't feel sick, really. I wonder if I take after my mother."

Dinas embraced Dessi with both arms, and she knew he knew her thoughts. Her mother, her sisters, their lost city, memories painful and beloved. She pressed her face against his chest for a moment, breathing against his warm-smelling skin till her eyes stopped threatening to run over; then she pushed him away and straightened her back. "I will be fine," she said jauntily, to Dinas and, somewhat, to herself. "I have your mother to help me, after all."

"And we have a feast to join." Dinas gave her a wide grin, just as jaunty, and reached for her hand, and hand in hand they wandered back to the village.

Their village of Kinasos sat on a rise of ground, between trees and streams, two concentric rings of houses, the inner round like the Copper Islanders' and the outer square like those of Lillun. In the center was a wide dancing space, now given over to the Autumn Feast being prepared.

[Dinas gives food over to his mother, they wander around, snack on stuff, Dessi sits down and compares it to Siano's wedding and misses them but feels at home. She dozes and dreams of the Minoans, and wakes up to the feast.)

reread bits of Silthri's story

[Dessi is hunting, then feast that includes a roast piglet. Community of 150 or so, 100 from Lillun and 50 from Copper Island, in 3 coastal villages]

(base feast on, but don't make identical : Beside large baskets of water sat a large joint of aurochs, which Orani had roasted, and five barley and four wheat flatbreads, all on a wooden tray. There was a basket of fruit, pomegranates and figs and grapes, and a basket of wild herbs, which Aine and Dessi had gathered the day before, and a large dish of green peas and barley baked with snails and a jointed rabbit, the same dish Silthri had remembered from her first wedding. Amnef had brought a basket of roasted nuts, and Silthri had made, because she knew Siano loved it, the kind of "bread" that is made by turning a very thick nut porridge out on a board and allowing it to set; there were three of them, two of sweet acorns and one of chestnuts with honey. Orani sat beside the hearth, making skewers out of fresh venison and wild mushrooms, and Zeora's daughter Amnao brought a pot of yogurt, her mother's gift.

Remember Cran has traveled far, from settlement to settlement, and is helping the rest adjust.


End file.
